Category: Films

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People who stunted my development

 

© The Mirisch Company / United Artists

 

I read recently that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – better and less grandiosely known as the folk who dole out the Oscars every year – are currently considering creating a new Oscar that will honour the work of the movie industry’s stunt performers.  A yearly award for the film featuring the best stunt-work looks a real possibility thanks to the efforts of Chad Stahelski, director of the John Wick series (2014-23).  He commented last month, “We’ve been meeting with members of the Academy and actually having these conversations…  Everybody on both sides wants this to happen. They want stunts at the Oscars.  It’s going to happen.”

 

Also creating a buzz lately about stunt-work – proper, practical stunts carried out by real people, as opposed to artificial action-sequences created with cartoony, shit-looking Computer-Generated Imagery – has been the trailer for the new Mission Impossible movie.  This is framed by a stunt involving the world’s most famous scientologist in which he deliberately barrels off a very high cliff.  The last person to do this so spectacularly was Roger Moore – or more accurately, stuntman Rick Sylvester – in the pre-credits sequence of The Spy Who Loved Me (1978).

 

Anyway, now seems an opportune time to dust down and repost this piece about my favourite practitioners of the art of stunt-work, which originally saw the light of day in 2018.

 

In my boyhood, there were no personal computers, video games or Internet to keep me inside the house.  For amusement, I had to go outside and play in a variety of locations that, thinking about it now, were a wee bit dangerous – at roadsides and riversides, in derelict buildings and old sheds, and on any roof or in any treetop I managed to climb up to.  I suppose many kids in the 1970s played in places like those, but I had an advantage.  I lived on a farm, which was full of machinery sheds, hay-sheds, grain stores, slurry pits, silage pits, workshops and outhouses. It was also right next to a river and a busy road.  Perhaps it was this potential for injury and death in my play-area that prompted me, like most pre-pubescent males in the 1970s, to resolve that when I grew up I was going to be a film stuntman.

 

Accordingly, when I went fishing one day at the age of nine and fell off the riverbank, into the river, the way I recounted the mishap to my school-mates later made it sound like how Paul Newman and Robert Redford had famously jumped off the cliff and into the river in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).  This feat of derring-do had actually been performed by the stuntmen Howard Curtis and Micky Gilbert.  To be honest, the bank I fell off was only two feet above the water, and the water itself was only three feet deep, but in situations like these you’re allowed to use your imagination.

 

In fact, I became much less enamoured with action-movie stars when it occurred to me that, most of the time, they didn’t perform the breath-taking stunts featured in their films.  Those were done by unsung stuntmen and stuntwomen, who therefore were the people I should admire.  If I’d been on the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, with my autograph book, I think I would have ignored Harrison Ford and made a beeline instead for stuntmen Vic Armstrong and the late Terry Richards.  And that’s a big reason why I despise the 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day, which made heavy use of CGI during its action scenes.  It seemed a betrayal of all the stunt-work that’d distinguished the Bond movies during their previous 40-year history and an insult to all the people who’d contributed to that stunt-work.  (By my count, Armstrong and Richards both worked on six official Bond movies, and each had one ‘rogue’ 007 production to their names too – Armstrong with 1983’s Never Say Never Again, Richards with 1967’s Casino Royale.)

 

Anyway, here’s a list of some of my favourite stunt performers throughout history….

 

© Walter Wanger Productions / United Artists

 

Born to a US ranching family in 1895, Yakima Canutt became a world-champion rodeo rider and by 1923 was involved in the fledgling motion-picture industry, inevitably playing cowboys in westerns.  However, he’d had his voice ravaged by flu during a two-year stint with the US Navy and he realised he couldn’t continue as an actor when silent films gave way to the talkies, and so he started to specialise in stunt-work.  Canutt ended up as stunt double for John Wayne, who claimed to have got many of his famous cowboy mannerisms – the strut, the drawl – from him.  As a cowboy, after all, Canutt was the real deal.

 

His most famous stunt is one he performed in 1939’s Stagecoach, in which he leaps onto a team of horses pulling the titular stagecoach, falls between them, gets dragged along and then disappears under the stagecoach itself.  This inspired the sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones is dragged beneath a German truck.  Canutt later became a second-unit director and staged the chariot race in 1959’s Ben Hur.  And despite sustaining injuries that required plastic surgery on at least two occasions, he lived to the ripe old age of 90.

 

Bud Ekins was a champion motorcyclist as well as a stuntman.  It was he – not Steve McQueen, as was believed for a long time – who rode the Triumph TR6 Trophy motorbike near the end of 1963’s The Great Escape, when McQueen’s character, pursued by half the German army, attempts to leap the giant fence that separates him from Switzerland.  (The famously petrol-headed McQueen did ride the motorbike during the preceding chase and was keen to perform the jump himself, but the filmmakers talked him out of it.)  That alone earns Ekins a place in my Stuntmen Hall of Fame, but he went on to do lots of other cool stuff.  He worked with McQueen again in Bullitt (1968), driving that film’s iconic Ford Mustang 390 GT, and he was also involved in Diamonds are Forever (1970), Race with the Devil (1975), Sorcerer (1977) and The Blues Brothers (1980).

 

Every time I’m on board a cable car and spot another cable car approaching from the opposite direction, I wonder if I’ll see Alf Joint perform a suicidal leap from the roof of one car onto the roof of the other – for Joint was the stuntman who doubled for Richard Burton in 1967’s Where Eagles Dare when Burton’s character had to hop cable cars close to the fearsome Schloss Adler, the mountaintop stronghold of the SS.  Like many a great British stuntman, Joint’s CV is a roll-call of Bond movies (he made two), Star Wars movies (one) and Superman movies (three).  He doubled for Eric Porter, playing Professor Moriarty in the acclaimed 1980s TV series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, when the character plunged to his doom at the Reichenbach Falls; and for Lee Remick in The Omen (1976), presumably during the sequence when Remick is pushed out of a hospital window and crashes through the roof of an ambulance passing below.

 

© Winkast Film Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

I also remember Joint performing a memorable stunt during the adverts for Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates, which ran on TV from 1968 to 2003 (though I hear they were revived a few years ago).  These featured the Milk Tray man, a Bondian character who kept risking life and limb in order to deliver boxes of the chocolates to a beautiful lady, with the tagline being: “And all because… the lady loves Milk Tray.”  I can’t recall if it was the same lady receiving all the chocolates in all the adverts – if it was, the poor woman must have developed type 2 diabetes by 2003.  Anyway, Joint did the Milk Tray man’s dive off a vertiginous cliff, into a shark-infested sea, in perhaps the most famous of these adverts in 1972.

 

Also involved in Where Eagles Dare was Eddie Powell, a stuntman who seemed to divide his time between James Bond movies – he made ten official ones, plus Never Say Never Again – and Hammer Films, where he was a stunt double for Christopher Lee in movies like The Mummy (1959), Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966) and To the Devil a Daughter (1976).  For that last film, he also did a ‘full body burn’ stunt during a scene where satanic forces cause Anthony Valentine to spontaneously combust inside a church.  In addition, Hammer gave him a few acting credits, predictably eccentric ones, such as the lumbering, bandaged monster in The Mummy’s Shroud (1967) and the half-man, half-beast Goat of Mendes conjured up at a witches’ sabbat in The Devil Rides Out (1968).

 

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts Productions

 

Later in his career, Powell performed stunts as the titular, drooling, acid-blooded, multi-mouthed beastie in Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986).  For instance, he took part in the first film’s engine-room scene where the alien swoops down on the hapless Harry Dean Stanton.

 

Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t mention William Hobbs here as he wasn’t exactly a stuntman.  He was a fight choreographer, more precisely a sword-fight choreographer, and his work enlivened many a swashbuckler over the years.  He directed the swordplay in The Three Musketeers (1973) and Four Musketeers (1974) and presumably had the difficult task of restraining Oliver Reed, who from all accounts threw himself into the movies’ fight scenes with the enthusiasm of a blade-wielding Whirling Dervish.  He also worked on Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), Ridley Scott’s The Duellists (1977) and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), for which he devised the samurai fights.  I generally can’t stand the 1980 Dino De Laurentiis production of Flash Gordon, but the sequence where Sam Jones fights Timothy Dalton on a platform while spikes erupt at random points and at random moments through its floor, again overseen by Hobbs, is one of the film’s few good parts.  Near the end of his life he was still working, on TV, arranging fights for Game of Thrones (2011-19).

 

Actually, you can see Hobbs in action in this instalment of the long-running TV show This is Your Life (1955-2007), rehearsing a gruelling-looking swordfight with Christopher Lee just before Eamonn Andrews surprises Lee and shepherds him off to a TV studio for a star-studded retrospective of his career.  (I usually found This is Your Life tacky and maudlin, but I thought this one was fascinating because, besides Lee and Hobbs, it corrals such movie legends as Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and the afore-mentioned Oliver Reed together under one roof.)

 

© Troublemaker Studios / Dimension Films

 

And now for a lady, the New Zealand stuntwoman Zoe Bell, who doubled for Lucy Lawless in the Xena: Warrior Princess TV show and for Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies.  Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004) involved a stunt where a shotgun blast hurled Bell backwards – this did so much damage to her ribs and wrist that she spent months recovering from it.  But there were clearly no hard feelings between Bell and Tarantino because for his next movie, 2007’s Death Proof, he cast her as herself.  She plays a movie stuntwoman – called Zoe Bell – who turns the tables on Kurt Russell’s car-driving serial killer.  Tarantino shares my disdain for CGI and insisted that all the vehicular action seen in Death Proof was the real deal, including a ‘ship’s mast’ stunt where Bell straddles the hood of a speeding Dodge Challenger R/T with only a couple of straps to hang onto.  Since then, she’s done more gigs for Tarantino, as a stuntwoman in Inglourious Basterds (2009), as an actress in Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2016), and as both in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

 

Finally, no roundup of my favourite stuntmen would be complete without mention of Vic Armstrong, who’s in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s busiest stunt double.  His brother Andy, his wife Wendy, and a half-dozen members of the younger generation of his family all work in the stunt / special-effects business too, which must make the Armstrongs the Corleones of the stunt-world.

 

As well as seven official and unofficial Bonds, his filmography includes three Indiana Joneses and three Supermen, plus a Rambo, Terminator, Omen, Conan and Mission Impossible.  He served not only as Harrison Ford’s stunt double while he played Indiana Jones, but also in Blade Runner (1982), Return of the Jedi (1983), The Mosquito Coast (1986), Frantic (1988) and Patriot Games (1992).  Indeed, back in his youth, his resemblance to the star was so striking that Ford once quipped to him, “If you learn to talk, I’m in deep trouble.”

 

© Titan Books

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Cinematic heroes 4: Brian Glover

 

© Brandywine Productions / 20th Century Fox

 

Brian Glover’s Wikipedia entry begins with a quote from the great man that served both as a mission statement and as a career summary: “You play to your strengths in this game.  My strength is as a bald-headed, rough-looking Yorkshireman.”  For a quarter-century, Glover played characters that were shiny of pate, pugnacious of visage and flat of vowels in many a British movie, TV show and stage play, and in the process made himself one of the most recognisable character actors in the country.

 

Born in Sheffield and brought up in Barnsley, the young Glover initially followed in his father’s footsteps.  His dad had been a professional wrestler and, while attending the University of Sheffield, Glover topped up his student grant by wrestling too.  He fought bouts under the moniker of ‘Leon Aris, the man from Paris’ and was good enough to appear on television, featuring in the Saturday-teatime wrestling slots shown on the ITV programme World of Sport that, a half-century ago, turned such burly, grappling bruisers as Kendo Nagasaki, Giant Haystacks, Mick McManus, Jim Brakes and Big Daddy into household names.  He continued to wrestle long after he’d graduated and settled into a respectable day job, which was teaching English and French at Barnsley Grammar School.

 

One of Glover’s school colleagues was Barry Hines, who’d authored the novel A Kestrel for a Knave.  In 1968, this was filmed as Kes by the incomparable Ken Loach. Loach needed someone to play the puffed-up, preposterous and loutish Mr Sugden, the PE teacher at the school attended by Kes’s put-upon, juvenile hero, Billy Casper (Dai Bradley).  Hines suggested Glover.  For his audition, and to test Glover’s believability as a teacher, Loach staged a playground brawl and got Glover to break it up.  This obviously wasn’t difficult for him, being a teacher already and a wrestler.

 

Glover’s turn as Sugden, who organises a football match with his pupils, insists on captaining one of the teams, and then cheats, dives and brutally fouls the kids while spouting his own match commenatary – likening himself to “the fair-haired, slightly-balding Bobby Charlton” – provides a bleak film with its one shaft of comic sunshine.  Come to think of it, Loach’s 1998 movie My Name is Joe has some funny footballing sequences too, and when he finally got round to directing a proper comedy, it was 2009’s Waiting for Eric with French soccer legend Eric Cantona.  The beautiful game is clearly the one thing guaranteed to make the famously grim, anti-establishment Loach lighten up.

 

© Woodfall Film Productions / United Artists

 

Glover spent another two years teaching before his next acting assignment, which was a role in the Terence Rattigan play Bequest to the Nation.  Thereafter, he swiftly became ubiquitous.  On television he appeared in Coronation Street (1972), The Regiment (1973), Dixon of Dock Green, The Sweeny, Quiller (all 1975), Secret Army (1977), Minder (1980), Last of the Summer Wine and Doctor Who (both 1985).  In that last show he makes a memorable exit when he’s blasted away by some Cybermen.  He also gives notable performances in two 1970s shows written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, who at the time scripted virtually the only British TV sitcoms set outside London and southeast England.  In a famous 1973 episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads he plays the devious Flint, who makes a bet with Geordie heroes Bob and Terry that they can’t get through the day in Newcastle-upon-Tyne without hearing the result of an important football match.  A year later, Glover joined the cast of Clement and La Frenais’ revered prison sitcom Porridge, playing the hapless, slow-witted convict Cyril Hislop, whose key line is: “I read a book once.  Green, it was.”

 

When not playing bald-headed, rough-looking Yorkshire chancers and convicts, Glover could leaven his northern tones with a twinkly avuncularity, which made him popular among advertisers.  Thus, when his face wasn’t popping up on TV shows, his voice was popping up on commercials between TV shows.  He voiced the TV advertisements for Allinson’s bread – “Bread with nowt taken out” – and for Tetley teabags.  In the Tetley ads, he played the leader of the Tetley Tea-folk, an animated tribe of diminutive, white-coated, cloth-capped characters tasked with the exacting job of giving each teabag its ‘2000 perforations’.

 

© Wellborn / United Artists

 

Meanwhile, during the 1970s, Glover became a regular in British movies. These included Lindsay Anderson’s oddball 1973 epic O Lucky Man! and its follow-up, 1982’s Britannia Hospital (about which I intend to write on this blog very soon); Michael Crichton’s 1979 period adventure The First Great Train Robbery; and Terry Gilliam’s 1978 medieval comedy Jabberwocky, in which he plays the foreman of an ironworks that’s reduced to chaos when Michael Palin blunders into it.  In Douglas Hickox’s 1975 London-set thriller Brannigan, he’s a minor villain who gets roughed up by John Wayne, playing a tough American cop on an assignment to the British capital – Wayne creates mayhem as he behaves like a Wild West sheriff dealing with an unruly frontier town.  “Now,” he warns Glover, “would you like to try for England’s free dental care or answer my question?”

 

In 1981, John Landis made his much-loved horror-comedy An American Werewolf in London, the opening scenes of which, set in a northern pub called the Slaughtered Lamb, called for a bald-headed, rough-looking Yorkshireman.  Obviously, there was only one man for the job.  Landis duly cast Glover and the resulting scene, wherein he entertains the Lamb’s patrons with his ‘Remember the Alamo!’ joke, is, along with Kes, his finest cinematic moment – both films show what a fine comic actor he was.  Unfortunately, the pub’s jovial mood is then ruined when David Naughton and Griffin Dunn inquire about the strange five-pointed star painted on the wall.  And as they’re ejected from the premises, Glover utters the film’s most quoted piece of dialogue: “Beware the moon, lads!”

 

© PolyGram Pictures / Gruber-Peters Company / Universal Pictures

 

Three years later, Glover turned up in another classic werewolf movie, playing a villager in Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Angela Carter’s gothic short story, The Company of Wolves.  At one point, he’s involved in a brawl with the previous subject of this Cinematic Heroes series of posts, David Warner; and at another, he comes out with a very Yorkshire-esque line: “If you think wolves are big now, you should have seen them when I were a lad!”

 

Glover faced another monster, a slimy one rather than a hairy one, in 1992’s Alien 3, wherein he plays the warden in charge of a prison-colony on the stormy planet Fiorina 161.  Sigourney Weaver crash-lands there, unwittingly bringing with her a cargo of egg-laying alien face-huggers.  Directed by a young David Fincher, Alien 3 is a much-maligned film.  It can’t help but seem anti-climactic after the previous film in the Alien series, James Cameron’s barnstorming Aliens (1986), and the fact that it begins by killing off most of the characters left alive at the end of Aliens didn’t endear it to fans.  It’s got some wonderfully grungy set design, though, and there is something heroic about the film’s un-Hollywood-like, and commercially-suicidal, pessimism.  Even Weaver herself gets it at the end.

 

One of Alien 3’s biggest problems is that, due to incompetent scripting and editing, most of its interesting characters – Glover, Charles Dance, Paul McGann – vanish from the story halfway through.  Incidentally, for British audiences, Glover perhaps brought a little too much baggage to his role.  When I saw Alien 3 in an Essex cinema, a scene where Weaver confronts Glover in his office, while he – voice of the Tetley Tea-folk – absent-mindedly dunks a teabag in a cup of boiling water, provoked guffaws.

 

© Brandywine Productions / 20th Century Fox

 

Glover must have got on well with Sigourney Weaver, for he subsequently turned up in 1997’s Snow White: a Tale of Terror, in which Weaver played the evil queen.  Another late role was in the endearingly off-the-wall 1993 comedy Leon the Pig Farmer, in which a young Jewish Londoner, played by Mark Frankel, gets the unsettling news that he was the result of an artificial-insemination mix-up and his father is actually a Yorkshire pig farmer – inevitably a bald-headed, rough-looking one played by Glover.  What makes Leon, which also starred Fawlty Towers’ Connie Booth and former Bond girl Maryam D’Abo, slightly melancholic to watch now is the knowledge that lead-actor Frankel died in a motorcycle accident a few years later.

 

Glover’s stage CV was as busy as his film and TV ones.  He appeared with the Royal Shakespeare Company in productions of As You Like It (playing, appropriately, Charles the Wrestler) and Romeo and Juliet, while other theatre work included Don Quixote, The Iceman Cometh, The Long Voyage Home, The Mysteries and Saint Joan.  Lindsay Anderson, a stage director as well as a film one, cast him in productions of the David Storey plays The Changing Room and Life Class and Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw.  Such was Glover’s fame by the time he appeared in a West End version of The Canterbury Tales that it was advertised with a slightly amended version of one of his catch-phrases: “Chaucer with nowt taken out.”

 

Glover was a literary figure as well.  He was a prolific playwright and writer, was responsible for over 20 plays and short films, and penned a column in a Yorkshire newspaper.  Asked to contribute a script to a 1976 TV drama anthology called Plays for Britain, which also featured writing by Stephen Poliakoff and Roger McGough, Glover found himself short of inspiration.  He ended up paying a visit to a police station and inquiring if they’d experienced anything unusual lately that he might be able to use as an idea.  While he was at the station, a woman trooped in to the front desk to report indignantly that someone had pinched her front door.  Suddenly, Glover knew what his story would be about.

 

Meanwhile, I remember seeing him on a TV arts programme, discussing – with Anthony Burgess, no less – Paul Theroux’s acerbic 1983 travel book about the British coastline, The Kingdom by the Sea.  Glover, who during his wrestling days had toured many of the towns Theroux wrote about, took particular exception to a comment Theroux made about Aberdeen: “…the average Aberdonian is someone who would gladly pick a halfpenny out of a dunghill with his teeth.”

 

© UK Film Council / Entertainment Film Distributors

 

Alas, in September 1996, Brian Glover met his own Alamo.  He underwent an operation for a brain tumour, although a fortnight later he was back at work, making one of his final films, Up ‘n’ Under.  Fittingly, this was about the north-of-England sport of rugby league and was made by the playwright John Godber, whose debut play Bouncers has become a much-revived classic.  Glover was among the first people to go and see Bouncers when it premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1977 and was quick to offer Godber encouragement.  Despite the surgery, the tumour eventually killed him in July 1997.

 

Thanks to his gruff-but-lovable persona, unmistakable voice, and talent for stealing any scene he was in, Glover lives on in the memory of people like me, who grew up watching a lot of television and movies in 1970s and 1980s Britain.  Those folk include actor Jason Isaacs, who admits to using him as inspiration for his star turn as the Soviet war-hero and Red Army commander-in-chief Georgy Zhukov in Armando Iannucci’s historical satire The Death of Stalin (2017).  While he played Zhukov as a blunt, abrasive and – crucially – Yorkshire-accented bad-ass, Isaacs said, “I had a picture of Brian Glover in my head.  Magnificent actor.”

 

Meanwhile, Glover is buried in Brompton Cemetery in London, where a simple gravestone describes him as a ‘Wrestler… Actor… Writer’.  Not just a Yorkshireman, then, but a true Renaissance man.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Edwardx

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Bad hombres

 

© Pan Macmillan 

 

June 13th saw the death of Cormac McCarthy, reckoned by many to be the greatest American novelist of his generation.  (However, he certainly wasn’t the last great American novelist, as some excitable types have suggested.  Don DeLillo is still with us, and Donna Tartt surely has much petrol left in her tank, and no doubt more notables will emerge in the future.)  Anyway, as a tribute, here’s a piece I wrote a few years ago after reading McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005), and when I felt an urge to compare it with the Oscar-winning film version of the same name, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, which had been released two years after its publication. 

 

A word of warning…  Just as there were in my entry a few days ago about the literary and cinematic versions of Jurassic Park – many spoilers lie ahead about No Country for Old Men in its book and film forms!  

 

I greatly admire Cormac McCarthy’s novels Blood Meridian (1985) and The Road (2006).  However, I hadn’t felt any overwhelming desire to read another of his most famous works, 2005’s No Country for Old Men, because I’d already seen the 2007 movie adaptation of it by Ethan and Joel Coen and I’d heard that the film followed the book closely.

 

Thus, thanks to the Coen Brothers, I already knew No Country for Old Men’s plot and characters.  I’d also found the film vaguely dissatisfying.  As I rather pretentiously explained to a friend at the time, “It’s like a Frankenstein’s monster where Jean-Paul Sartre’s head is stitched onto Clint Eastwood’s body.”  What I meant was that for most of its running time the film was a lean, ruthless thriller, a gripping piece of modern western noir.  But then near the end, its remorseless storyline just stops.  After that, there’s a protracted scene where Tommy Lee Jones’s Sheriff Bell character visits an elderly relative and announces his intention to retire because, basically, the world is a terrible place and he can’t handle it any longer.  And so the film seems to peter out amid lamentations of existentialist angst.

 

© Miramax Films / Paramount Vantage

 

I’d assumed that, since it was supposedly a faithful adaptation of the book, the book would have a similarly dissatisfying ending.  Which admittedly was a bit unfair towards Cormac McCarthy.

 

A while ago I spotted a second-hand copy of No Country for Old Men, the book, on sale in a charity shop.  And with that jolt of horror you get occasionally when you’re growing older and realise how quickly time seems to be passing, it occurred to me how it’d been a dozen years since I’d seen the movie.  I’d also forgotten a lot of what’d happened in it.  This seemed a good opportunity to buy the literary version of No Country for Old Men and acquaint myself with it.

 

My main impression after reading No Country for Old Men was that, yes, for the most part, the Coen Brothers were remarkably faithful to the original when they made their movie.  As the story unfolds – a hunter and Vietnam vet called Llewellyn Moss stumbles across the bloody, corpse-strewn aftermath of a drug-deal-gone-wrong on the remote Texas / Mexico border, lifts a satchel full of money and makes a run for it, only to be pursued by a gang of vengeful narcos, as well as by a certain Anton Chigurh, a hitman so relentless, merciless and fearsome he makes the Terminator look like Bambi – I found near-identical scenes from the movie returning to my memory after many years.

 

One difference between the book and the film I noticed early on was when Moss, having scarpered with the money, nobly but foolishly decides to return to the scene of the massacre because he’d left behind one survivor, a badly-injured gangster who was begging for water.  When he comes back with some water for that survivor, the survivor is surviving no longer; and one of the cartels involved has sent along some new hoodlums to find out what’s happened to their drugs and money.  There follows a nail-biting chase across the desert, climaxing with Moss flinging himself into a river to escape the hoodlums.  In the film, the Coen Brothers ratchet the suspense up further by introducing a big attack dog that doesn’t appear in the book.  Even the river doesn’t deter the brute in its pursuit of Moss because it’s a powerful swimmer.  In fact, the dog is a crafty metaphorical foreshadowing of Anton Chigurh, who is soon pursuing Moss too.  If there’s one thing you want following you even less than a big attack dog, it’s him.

 

The book also has more of Sheriff Bell, the ageing lawman trying to find and save Moss whilst also keeping tabs on Carla Jean, Moss’s young wife.  At regular intervals, there are short chapters showing Bell’s stream of consciousness while he ruminates on existence and the general state of things.  “My daddy always told me to just do the best you know how and tell the truth…” he says at one point.  “And if you done somethin wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it.”  This makes him a likeable and sympathetic character, but not too much so.  Later, as we hear more of his musings, we discover some of his views are pretty reactionary and probably if he was still around in 2016 – the story is set in the 1980s – he’d have voted for Donald Trump.  These interludes also prepare us for the gloomy philosophical ending, in a way we weren’t prepared for it whilst watching the film.

 

For much of the book and film, the plot is an increasingly desperate and nasty cat-and-mouse game between Moss and Chigurh, while various foot-soldiers arrive from the cartels and get blown away in the crossfire.  McCarthy describes it all in his admirably economical and deceptively simple-looking prose, though lovers of punctuation will cringe at his brutal disregard for inverted commas.

 

From wikipedia.org / © David Styles

 

It helps too that McCarthy really seems to know the macho, rural and violent world he’s writing about: its cartel machinations, its police procedures, its vehicles, its guns: “The rifle had a Canjar trigger set to nine ounces and he pulled the rifle and the boot towards him with great care and sighted again and jacked the crosshairs slightly up the back of the animal standing most broadly to him…  Even with the heavy barrel and the muzzlebrake the rifle bucked up off the rest.  When he pulled the animals back into the scope he could see them all standing as before.  It took the 150-grain bullet the better part of a second to get there but it took the sound twice that.”  I’m unfamiliar with McCarthy’s background – he was very reclusive – and have no idea if he was really the man’s man, the rugged Hemmingway type, that he comes across as here.  But the fact that he does certainly doesn’t harm the telling of the story.

 

I felt apprehensive as I approached the novel’s end.  Would the main storyline finish as abruptly and unsatisfyingly as it did in the film?  In the latter, Bell arrives at a motel for a rendezvous with Moss, only to discover that Moss has just been killed (offscreen) by some cartel hoodlums.  After that, the film has only the scene where Bell decides to call it quits, plus one where Chigurh pays a visit to the now-widowed Carla Jean and it’s implied that he executes her.  (In the book, it’s spelt out more clearly.)  No doubt the Coen Brothers were happy to make a statement about the fickleness of fate and the randomness of life and death, and by this late moment in the film, Moss had surely used up all of his nine lives.  But having spent the most of two hours rooting for him, I wanted something more than a brief, flippant reference to him getting killed.  Call me old-fashioned, but I’d have liked a little more closure with the character.

 

In the book, Moss dies with an equal sense of arbitrariness – Bell shows up at the motel and finds out that his man has just been assassinated.  However, there’s more.  The Coen Brothers made a major break with this section of the book because they left out a character, a female teenage runaway.  McCarthy has Moss pick the girl up while she’s hitchhiking and while he’s making the fateful journey to the motel.  To be honest, the girl isn’t much of a character, being a teenage brat who thinks she knows it all.  But at least her naivete provides context for Moss, who by now is feeling as old, jaded and world-weary as Bell.  Later, at the motel, she offers to sleep with Moss, but wanting to stay faithful to Carla Jean he turns her down.

 

When Moss finally gets there, yes, the gangsters have intervened and Moss is dead, as was the case in the film.  However, the book has a deputy tell Bell what happened from the eyewitness reports: “…the Mexican started it.  Says he drug the woman out of her room and the other man (Moss) came out with a gun but when he seen the Mexican had a gun pointed at the woman’s head he laid his own piece down.  And whenever he done that the Mexican shoved the woman away and shot her and then turned and shot him….  Shot em with a goddamned machinegun.  Accordin to this witness the old boy fell down the steps and then he picked up his gun again and shot the Mexican.  Which I dont see how he done it.  He was shot all to pieces.”  So at least Moss dies making a noble (if futile) self-sacrifice and goes down with guns blazing, taking out one last bad guy.  That’s more like the closure I was looking for.

 

I know people who’ve objected to both the book and film of No Country for Old Men because of another disappearing plotline, the one involving Anton Chigurh, who in the film was memorably played by Javier Bardem.  Both end with him still on the loose, presumably being unspeakably evil and continuing to kill people.  But I don’t mind that loose thread so much.  I find it appropriate that McCarthy wraps up the story with Bell lamenting about the darkness of the world; while Chigurh still lurks in that darkness as a symbolic bogeyman.

 

© Miramax Films / Paramount Vantage

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Jurassic snark

 

© Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

 

As yet another grim reminder that time stops for no man or woman, and that I’m gradually de-evolving into a doddery, senile old git, I’ve just read in a newspaper that it is now, exactly, thirty years since the release of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), the epic monster movie about dinosaurs being cloned from ancient bits of DNA to be put on display in a lavish theme park.  It was based on a novel, published three years earlier, by Michael Crichton, and of course it led to a franchise of sequels and reboots that, despite being increasingly lame, generated billions of box-office dollars.

 

Wow!  Thirty years?  Was the original Jurassic Park movie really that long ago?

 

Anyway, readers, brace yourselves for a big shock.  I thought the 1993 movie was pretty lame itself.  Although a lot of people nowadays view the original Jurassic Park as a classic – here’s a hot-off-the-presses feature at the BBC website’s ‘Culture’ section praising it for how it ‘made scary movies accessible for young children’; and here’s another feature at the Guardian praising it for its prescient warnings about ‘self-styled geniuses’ who exploit new technology for their aggrandisement without thinking through the potential consequences – I found it a big let-down.

 

This was because I made the mistake of reading Crichton’s Jurassic Park-the-book before I went to see Spielberg’s Jurassic–Park-the-movie, and I felt miffed when what’d I’d visualised in my head during the book failed to materialise on the cinema screen.  And before you read further, here’s a spoiler alert.  This entry will give away a lot about the plots of both the book and the film.

 

Three decades ago, I certainly had high hopes for the film.  Firstly, with Spielberg at the helm and a ton of Hollywood money behind it, Jurassic Park looked like being a very rare beast, a dinosaur movie with proper dinosaurs in it.  I’ve always loved the idea of dinosaur movies, but apart from those ones where the prehistoric beasties were powered by stop-motion animation – like the silent-movie version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1925) and the original King Kong (1933), whose dinosaurs were animated by Willis O’Brien, and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), One Million Years BC (1966) and The Valley of Gwangi (1969), whose special effects were the work of the late, great Ray Harryhausen – dinosaur movies before 1993 had contained dinosaurs that looked, frankly, rubbish.

 

© Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

 

I’m thinking of ones where the dinosaurs were plainly stuntmen lumbering about in rubbery dinosaur suits, like The Land Unknown (1957).  Or magnified glove puppets, like The Land that Time Forgot (1974).  Or unfortunate modern-day lizards who’d also been magnified and had had fake spikes, horns and fins glued onto them to make them look big and fierce.  The worst offender in that last category is surely Irwin Allen’s terrible 1960 remake of The Lost World, during which Claude Rains exclaimed at the sight of one supposed sauropod: “It’s a mighty brontosaurus!”  While I was watching the film on TV, at the age of ten, I yelled back: “No, it’s not!  It’s just a stupid iguana!”

 

The big-budget Jurassic Park was going to employ all the latest advances in animatronics and computer-generated imagery to get its dinosaurs right, so I wouldn’t have to worry about having my intelligence insulted by the spectacle of men in monster suits and overblown puppets and lizards.

 

Secondly, there was a buzz about Jurassic Park because it was rumoured that, for the first time in yonks, Spielberg was going to do something dark.  He’d spent the past dozen years making movies with unbearably-high schmaltz levels: movies about cute aliens phoning home (1982’s ET), and ghostly pilots moping about their still-alive girlfriends (1989’s Always), and Robin Williams turning out to be Peter Pan (1991’s Hook).  Once upon a time, though, he’d directed punchy, at times nightmarish films like Duel (1972) and Jaws (1975).  Prior to Jurassic Park’s release, I was told by more than one film magazine to expect Spielberg to be back to his old schmaltz-free best.  Supposedly, Jurassic Park was going to be like Jaws on dry land.

 

As for Michael Crichton’s original novel – well, it would never be mistaken for great literature but, reading it, I did think that with cutting-edge special effects and a skilful director it could make a hell of a movie.  Many of its scenes seemed intensely cinematic.  Actually, this wasn’t a surprise because Crichton himself had made films.  Most notably, he’d wrote and directed 1973’s Westworld, which is about a futuristic theme park that allows its visitors to enact their most homicidal fantasies in mock-ups of the American Wild West, medieval Europe and Roman-era Pompeii.  These are populated by scores of human-like robots whom it’s okay to shoot or hack or stab to death because they can’t actually die.  Of course, a glitch in the system eventually compels the robots to start fighting back and then it’s the holiday-makers who get slaughtered.  Westworld, in fact, is a prototype for Jurassic Park, with the same theme-park setting but with robots instead of dinosaurs as the exhibits-that-turn-nasty.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Jon Chase, Harvard News Office

 

I knew Crichton’s novel would get trimmed as it was turned into a film, but I was dismayed at how much of it was trimmed.  While Jaws shed a few gratuitous sub-plots that’d made its source novel, the 1974 bestseller by Peter Benchley, seem flabby, and it was a lean, muscular movie as a result, Spielberg’s Jurassic Park was pared to the bone.  In its final reel the park’s pack of deadly velociraptors have escaped from their compound, the surviving humans are running around trying to avoid being eaten by them, and that’s about it.  The velociraptors rampage through the book’s final chapters too, but there are other matters adding to the suspense.  It becomes clear that some velociraptors have managed to board the supply-ship that services the island where the park is located, and there’s a real danger that they’ll reach the American mainland and become an ultra-lethal invasive species.  The humans are also on a desperate quest to count the hatched eggs in the velociraptors’ nests, so that they can calculate just how many of the scaly killers are on the loose.

 

Also simplified are the fates of the characters.  The main characters, palaeontologists Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler, chaos theorist Ian Malcolm and the billionaire mastermind behind the park, John Hammond, don’t all make it to the end of the book.  Malcolm expires from injuries sustained from a dinosaur attack while Hammond dies after he hears the roar of a tyrannosaurus rex, panics and falls down a hillside.  (Ironically, the roar comes from the park’s PA system – Hammond’s two young grandchildren have been mucking around in a control room with some dinosaur recordings.)  Meanwhile, certain secondary characters, like the park’s lawyer Gennaro and its game warden Muldoon, survive the dino-carnage.  Gennaro is even allowed to show a degree of courage, which is unusual for a fictional corporate lawyer.

 

In the movie, though, Grant, Sattler, Malcolm and Hammond are played by big-name stars – Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and veteran British actor / director Sir Richard Attenborough – who clearly had it in their contracts that none of them would suffer the indignity of being eaten by a dinosaur.  So, they all survive.  But because this is a monster movie, which demands that monsters eat people at regular intervals, the supporting characters are gradually bumped off, including Gennaro and Muldoon.  This makes the plot very predictable.  Interestingly, one supporting character who got killed in the book but made it out of the movie alive is the geneticist Henry Wu.  Played by B.D. Wong, he’s ironically become the character with the most appearances in the Jurassic Park franchise – Wu’s now turned up in four of the movies.

 

Meanwhile, the casting of Attenborough symptomizes one of the film’s worst features.  The cuddly, twinkly Attenborough, who one year later would play Santa Claus in a remake of Miracle on 34th Street, is way nicer than the John Hammond of the book, who’s a callous, conniving and delusional arsehole.  He should have been played by Christopher Lee or Donald Pleasence.

 

© Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

 

Spielberg couldn’t bring himself to be nasty to Hammond, whom he probably regarded as a kindred spirit.  Hammond at his dinosaur theme park, like Spielberg in Hollywood, is merely trying to wow the masses by giving them spectacles they haven’t seen before.  How could he be bad?  Thus, we get a maudlin scene where Hammond explains his motives to Dern’s character by reminiscing about his first venture in the entertainment business – a flea circus.  (Attenborough also gives Hammond the worst Scottish accent in movie history, so he tells Dern how he brought his wee flea circus “doon sooth frae Scotland” to London.)  Look how big the fleas are in his circus now, Spielberg seems to tell us.  What a visionary!

 

The softening of Hammond’s character infects the rest of the film.  Though some of the velociraptor and tyrannosaurus-rex scenes are scary, it’s all a bit too feel-good.  Spielberg wants us to be awed by the dinosaurs, not shit ourselves at them.  John Williams’ musical score adds to the problem – his Jurassic Park theme, according to Billboard magazine, oozes with ‘astonishment, joy and wonder’; but since this is supposedly a sci-fi horror movie, shouldn’t it be oozing with some old-fashioned fear too?

 

But my biggest frustration about the film was that while Spielberg portrays Hammond as being like Walt Disney, the park isn’t like Disneyland – and it ought to be.  In the novel Crichton wonderfully juxtaposes the primeval and the high-tech.  There might be hordes of monstrous reptiles from earth’s distant past stumping around the wilds of Hammond’s island, but at the same time the place bristles with state-of-the-art sensors and cameras and is honeycombed with service tunnels crammed full of power-cables.  At its centre is Hammond’s console-packed control room where he squats like a space-age spider in a technological web.  The joy of the book is watching all this technology slowly, gradually start to malfunction and break down – until finally it’s useless.  And meanwhile, the prehistoric stars of the show are clawing at the scenery, hungry to get at the humans who’ve been pulling the levers behind it.

 

You don’t really get this impression in the film.  Attenborough’s control room looks a bit dingy, like he’s set it up in his garden shed.  And the dinosaurs just seem to be out in big fields with big fences around them – nothing in the background but foliage, nothing underneath but soil.  This Jurassic Park is more like Jurassic Farm.

 

No, while I sat through Jurassic Park in a cinema 22 years ago, I didn’t feel like I was watching a classic.  The main thing I felt was a huge sense of disappointment – crushing me as effectively as if one of the behemoths onscreen had suddenly stepped out into the auditorium and trod on me.  For the authentic Jurassic Park thrill-ride, check out Crichton’s book.

 

© Alfred A. Knopf

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When novelists and films collide

 

From Wikipedia / © Antonio Monda

 

May 19th saw the death of Martin Amis, reckoned by some to be the greatest British novelist of his generation.  I have to say that’s not an opinion I shared, although I liked his 1984 novel Money and some of the stories in his 1987 collection Einstein’s Monsters.  Anyway, one thing I noticed about the lengthy obituaries of Amis I read after his passing – none of them mentioned the fact that he wrote the script for 1980’s science-fiction movie Saturn 3.  This features a saucy robot, programmed with the libido of Harvey Keitel, pursuing Farah Fawcett around a base on one of Saturn’s moons.  Why the omission?  No doubt Amis’s obituarists declined to mention it out of respect.  Saturn 3 was an embarrassment and Amis surely left it off his CV.

 

However, Amis and Saturn 3 do highlight how, over the decades, well-respected authors have been involved with the film industry – a world less interested in creative endeavour and excellence and more interested in giving the public what it wants, putting bums on seats and making a fast buck – and the results have frequently not been pretty.

 

Here are a few of my favourite examples of novelists and filmmakers colliding and the movies birthed by those collisions being, let’s say, memorable for the wrong reasons.

 

© Amicus Productions

 

John Brunner and The Terrornauts (1967)

The science-fiction author John Brunner was highly regarded in his day and won both the Hugo and the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards for his 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar.  Also, his 1979 novel The Jagged Orbit netted another BSFA award and his pessimistic and prescient 1972 novel, The Sheep Look Up, about extreme pollution and environmental disaster, was much admired too.  Though he’s not so well-remembered now, the BBC website did devote a feature to him in its Culture section a few years back.

 

Perplexingly, the only film script Brunner ever wrote was for the ultra-low-budget British sci-fi movie The Terrornauts (1967), which is about some astronomers contacting the remnants of an alien civilisation stowed away on an asteroid, being abducted and taken to that asteroid, and eventually having to fight off an invasion fleet that’s heading towards earth.  Brunner’s script was based on a book called The Wailing Asteroid (1960) by another sci-fi writer, Murray Leinster.  I saw The Terrornauts on late-night TV when I was 11 and even at that young age thought it was dreadful, with its poverty-row special effects, its cardboard sets, and the thuddingly incongruous presence of comedy actors Charles Hawtrey and Patricia Hayes, inserted into the proceedings for alleged ‘comic relief’.  Still, The Terrornauts was so terrible that it burned itself into my memory and I’ve never been able to forget the bloody thing since.  For the filmmakers, I guess that was some sort of achievement.

 

Chief among those filmmakers was producer Milton Subotsky, who ran Amicus Productions with Max J. Rosenberg during the 1960s and 1970s and was better known for making horror movies.  I read an interview with Brunner once and he confessed to writing The Terrornauts as a favour to Subotsky, who was a friend of his.  Subotsky and Rosenberg, incidentally, had form in getting literary folk to pen their screenplays. They drew at various times on Robert Bloch, Margaret Drabble, Harold Pinter and Clive James, the latter for a film that never got off the drawing board.  And for their 1974 lost world / dinosaur epic The Land That Time Forgot, they hired another esteemed science-fiction writer, Michael Moorcock.  The low-budget dinosaurs in The Land That Time Forgot are rubbery and a bit laughable by today’s standards, but Moorcock was gracious enough to describe the film as ‘a workmanlike piece of crap.’

 

And speaking of dinosaurs…

 

© Hammer Films

 

J.G. Ballard and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1969)

Ballard is one of my all-time favourite writers.  While a few filmmakers have come close to successfully translating his disturbing, dystopian and hallucinogenic literary visions into celluloid, such as David Cronenberg did with Crash (1996) and Ben Wheatley with High–Rise (2015), the pulpy When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth was, weirdly, the only film that Ballard himself scripted.  This was a sequel by Hammer Films – like Subotsky and Rosenberg’s Amicus, a British company best known for making horror movies – to its 1965 epic One Million Years BC, featuring Raquel Welch as a fur-bikini-clad cavewoman and with splendid stop-motion-animation dinosaurs courtesy of special-effects genius Ray Harryhausen.

 

While One Million Years BC is a movie to watch and enjoy with your brain set at low gear, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth is one where you need to switch your brain off altogether.  Aside from the obvious scientific absurdity of human beings and dinosaurs being shown to exist at the same time, when they’d really missed each other by 65 million years, the film ends with a natural cataclysm so violent that part of the earth breaks off and creates the moon.  But somehow, its main characters survive the carnage.  The dinosaurs this time were animated by Jim Danforth and, though not up to Harryhausen’s standard, they’re good fun.

 

How, you wonder, did Ballard get emmeshed in such hokum?  In his 2008 autobiography Miracles of Life, he gives an amusing account of meeting Hammer producers Aida Young and Tony Hinds when they were trying to brainstorm ideas for the film.  The meeting had not gone well, but then Ballard rather desperately suggested that the big cataclysm at the end contain not a tidal wave crashing in, but one surging out from the shoreline.  This would reveal “’…All those strange creatures and plants…’ I ended with a brief course in surrealist biology…  There was silence as Hinds and Aida stared at each other.  I assumed I was about to be shown the door…  ‘When the wave goes out…’  Hinds stood up, clearly rejuvenated, standing behind his huge desk like Captain Ahab sighting the white whale.  ‘Brilliant.  Jim, who’s your agent?’”

 

© Rothernorth Films / Redemption Films  

 

Fay Weldon and Killer’s Moon (1978)

Here’s the most mind-boggling collaboration on this list.  On one hand, we have the feminist author Fay Weldon, who in works like The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983) strove to “write about and give a voice to women who are often overlooked or not featured in the media.”  On the other, we have Alan Birkinshaw’s bonkers, grubby, low-budget horror effort Killer’s Moon, which seems the last thing Weldon would get involved with.  Yet, uncredited, she rewrote the film’s dialogue.

 

Killer’s Moon has a quartet of escaped lunatics (wearing bowler hats like the Droogs in Stanley Kubrick’s controversial 1971 classic A Clockwork Orange) stalking the Lake District and terrorising some teenaged girls on a school trip whose coach has broken down.  The loonies’ psychiatric treatment has included being dosed with LSD and now, mistakenly, they believe themselves to be dreaming.  This makes them think they’re free to indulge without any repercussions in their darkest fantasies, which consist of rape, murder and animal mutilation.  But don’t worry, animal-lovers.  The dog that loses a limb early on, and spends the rest of the film hobbling about on three legs, was three-legged in real life.  According to Killer’s Moon’s Wikipedia entry, she “was originally a pub dog who had lost a leg as the result of a shotgun wound sustained during an armed robbery.  She was later awarded the doggy Victoria Cross award for bravery.”

 

Weldon’s involvement was for a familial reason.  Director Birkinshaw was none other than her brother.  She grumbled that by working on Killer’s Moon, she’d turned it into a ‘cult film’, but that’s exaggerating things a bit.  Seen in 2023, Killer’s Moon is no cult film.  It’s still daft, badly-made tat, and the bits of it that once seemed shocking just seem funny today.

 

© ITC Entertainment

 

Martin Amis and Saturn 3 (1980)

And now the movie that inspired this entry, the dire Saturn 3.  Amis’s script was based on a story by John Barry – not the composer most famous for his work on the James Bond films, but John Barry the set designer on Star Wars (1977), who died of meningitis the year before Saturn 3 was released.  Horror writer Stephen Gallagher was assigned the job of writing Saturn 3’s tie-in novelisation and once said of it: “The script was terrible.  I thought it was bad then but in retrospect, and with experience, I can see how truly inept it was.”  Gallagher added that this may not have been Amis’s fault and the script could have fallen victim to the film industry’s penchant for endless re-writing.  He heard later that “every script-doctor in town had taken an uncredited swing at it, so it’s impossible to say if it was stillborn or had been gangbanged to death.”

 

Supposedly, Amis based some of his novel Money on his experiences with Saturn 3.  It’s even said that one of Money’s characters, the ageing movie star Lorne Guyland, who’s convinced of his enduring youth and virility and isn’t afraid to disrobe and flaunt his body in an effort to prove it, was inspired by Saturn 3’s star Kirk Douglas.  Years later, Amis remarked: “When actors get old they get obsessed with wanting to be nude…  And Kirk wanted to be naked.”

 

© Zoetrope Studios / Golan-Globus

 

Norman Mailer and Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987)

Three years after the publication of his crime-noir pastiche Tough Guys Don’t Dance, Norman Mailer got the chance to turn the book into a film starring Ryan O’Neal, Isabella Rossellini, Lawrence Tierney and Wings Hauser.  The venerable American novelist was both co-scripter and director.  I wrote extensively about Tough Guys Don’t Dance-the-movie a couple of months ago, so I won’t repeat here too much of what I said.  It was, I wrote, “a delirious slice of so-bad-it’s-good campness”,  where the cast visibly struggle “as they try to get their tongues, and their minds, around Mailer’s dialogue, which is largely fixated on performing the sex-deed with adequate levels of manliness.  At one point Rossellini tells O’Neal that she and her husband, Hauser, ‘make out five times a night.  That’s why I call him Mr Five.’  Though this is contradicted when Rossellini and Hauser have an argument.  ‘I made you come 16 times – in a night.’  ‘And none of them was any good!’”

 

And of course, there’s the scene where hero Ryan O’Neal “finds out about his wife’s infidelity and reacts with a jaw-dropping display of bad acting – ‘Oh man!   Oh God!  Oh man!  Oh God!’ – which, over the years, has become so infamous it’s now an Internet meme.”

 

© Scott Free Productions / 20th Century Fox

 

Cormac McCarthy and The Counselor (2013)

Also not having much success with sexy dialogue was legendary American author Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the script for the Ridley Scott-directed movie The Counselor.  At one point in The Counselor, we get an auto-erotic scene – that’s ‘auto’ as in ‘involving automobiles’ – where Cameron Diaz makes out with Javier Bardem’s sports car.  While grinding against the windscreen on her way to a climax, and flashing a certain part of her anatomy at Bardem on the other side of the glass, he likens the sight to “one of those catfish things, one of the bottom-feeders you see go up the side of the fish tank.”

 

Most critics panned The Counselor, presumably because they’d hoped that it would combine the intensity of McCarthy’s celebrated ultra-violent Western novel Blood Meridan (1985) with the intensity of Scott’s darkly-perverse space-horror movie Alien (1980).  What they got, though, was a bewildering crime thriller about drug cartels that, to quote Mark Kermode in the Observer, “gets an A-list cast to recite B-movie dialogue with C-minus results.”

 

Michel Houellebecq and the KIRAC arthouse porn movie (2023)

Many writers have turned up in films as actors, usually in supporting or cameo roles – Maya Angelou, William S. Burroughs, Stephen King, Salman Rushdie and, indeed, Norman Mailer and Martin Amis (who as a blond 13-year-old starred in 1965’s A High Wind in Jamaica).  I doubt, though, if any of these have generated as much noise as French author Michel Houellebecq’s recent, er, performance in a film production from radical Dutch art collective KIRAC (Keeping It Real Art Critics).  I haven’t managed to find the title of the film — which sounds like it belongs to the ‘arthouse porn’ category — in the news reports about it.

 

Houellebecq, it transpires, agreed to be filmed having sex in the movie and signed a waiver saying that the only restriction on his participation was that his face and his ‘block and tackle’ didn’t appear together in the same shot.  KIRAC didn’t even extend an invitation to him originally.  It was Qianyun Lysis, Houellebecq’s better half, who suggested they use her husband – and no, it’s not her, but another woman who appears in bed with Houellebecq in the film.  Now anyone who’s read his sex-filled and provocative novels, such as Atomised (1998) and Platform (2001), would assume this sort of thing is right up Houellebecq’s street.  However, he lost his enthusiasm for the project after a few days of filming (and after the deed had been captured on camera).  He then denounced the production and has since been trying, and failing, to stop KIRAC releasing the film in France and Netherlands.

 

If I was crass and prurient, I would roll my eyes at this and give a little cry of “Oh là là!”  But I’m not.  So, I won’t.

 

© From Wikipedia / © Fronteiras do Pensamento

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The literary Bond revisited: Octopussy and The Living Daylights

 

© Jonathan Cape

 

I once read a comment made by esteemed poet Philip Larkin about James Bond’s unsuitability for a short-fiction format: “I am not surprised that Fleming preferred to write novels.  James Bond, unlike Sherlock Holmes, does not fit snugly into the short story length: there is something grandiose and intercontinental about his adventures that require elbow room and such examples of the form as we have tend to be eccentric and muted.”

 

As a boy, I would have agreed.  I read most of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books back then and the one I was least enamoured with was For Your Eyes Only.  Actually, FYEO (as I’ll refer to it) wasn’t a novel but a collection of short stories featuring Bond.  In one of them, Quantum of Solace – which had nothing to do with the 22nd official Bond movie, made with Daniel Craig in 2008 – all 007 did was sit and listen to somebody else narrate a story about a different set of characters.

 

For me at the age of 11, a good Bond story needed a super-villain with an imposing HQ, and a nefarious scheme involving espionage and / or criminality, and a love interest, and various action scenes where said super-villain tried, unsuccessfully, to bump Bond off.  And of course, with Ian Fleming, there’d also be a wealth of background detail culled from Fleming’s experiences as a globetrotting journalist, naval intelligence officer and bon viveur and from his research – research was something he was scrupulous about.  Cramming all these things into a short story was not viable, I thought.  Thus, the truncated slices of Bondery that appeared in FYEO just seemed weird to me.

 

They seem much less weird to me today – especially since, after reading FYEO, I saw such opulent but ramshackle Bond films as The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979).  Their plots were so disjointed, thanks to the filmmakers’ wish to squeeze in as many different, exotic locations and spectacular action set-pieces as possible, that they often felt like a series of short, barely-connected stories rather than a single, coherent, movie-length one.

 

Anyway, Larkin wasn’t talking about FYEO but about Fleming’s other collection of James Bond short stories, Octopussy and The Living Daylights, which was published in 1966, two years after Fleming’s death.  This book constitutes Bond’s final appearance in print, as penned by his creator.  It originally consisted of just the two stories mentioned in the title, although subsequent editions beefed it up with the addition of two more, The Property of a Lady and 007 in New York.  Nonetheless, it remains a slim volume.  Even with four stories, it comes to a mere 123 pages.

 

Since then, of course, Octopussy and The Living Daylights have lent their titles to Bond movies, in 1982 and 1987 respectively.  A film has yet to be made called The Property of a Lady and to be honest I think Adele or Billie Eilish would have difficulty wrapping their vocal chords around the title in a Bond-movie theme song.  (“The proper-TEE… of a lad-EE…!”  No, can’t imagine it.)  Obviously, 007 in New York wouldn’t cut it as a movie title at all.  Mind you, there was a TV movie made in 1976 called Sherlock Holmes in New York starring, heaven help us, Roger Moore as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s deerstalker-wearing detective, so anything is possible.

 

© Eon Productions

 

Octopussy and The Living Daylights was one of the few Fleming-Bond books I hadn’t read in my boyhood, so when I encountered a copy of it in a bookstore a while ago thought I’d give it a shot.  How would I get on with it?  Four decades after I’d read FYEO, would I find the short-story James Bond more palatable?

 

The opening story, Octopussy, is the longest one in the collection but it has Bond only as a secondary character.  The story concerns a Major Dexter Smythe, described acidly by Fleming as “the remains of a once brave and resourceful officer and of a handsome man…”  Now “he was fifty-four, slightly bald and his belly sagged in the Jantzen trunks.  And he had had two coronary thromboses…  But, in his well-chosen clothes, his varicose veins out of sight and his stomach flattened by a discreet support belt behind an immaculate cummerbund, he was still a fine figure of a man at a cocktail party or dinner on the North Shore…”

 

The North Shore mentioned in that excerpt is the north coast of Jamaica.  During the post-war years Smythe and his wife, now deceased, established themselves there after escaping from hard-pressed, austerity-era Britain: “They were a popular couple and Major Smythe’s war record earned them the entrée to Government House society, after which their life was one endless round of parties, with tennis for Mary and golf (with the Henry Cotton irons!) for Major Smythe.  In the evenings there was bridge for her and the high poker game for him.  Yes, it was paradise all right, while, in their homeland, people munched their spam, fiddled in the black market, cursed the government and suffered the worst winter weather for thirty years.”

 

Yet this easy, comfortable life in Jamaica didn’t fall into Smythe’s lap.  Gradually, Fleming enlightens us on how Smythe was able to afford it.  In a back story that has echoes of B. Traven’s 1927 novel and John Huston’s 1948 movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, we learn that in the Austrian Alps at the end of World War II, he stumbled across something immensely valuable that he hoarded for himself.  To do this, however, he also had to commit murder.  Octopussy describes what happens when Smythe’s ‘ancient sin’ finally catches up with him.  The bearer of the bad news – that the authorities have found out what he did back in the war and intend to arrest him – is a ‘tall man’ in a ‘dark-blue tropical suit’ with ‘watchful, serious blue-grey eyes’.  It’s Bond.  But Bond isn’t just carrying out a professional errand.  Eventually we discover that he has a personal stake in bringing Smythe to justice.

 

Once you accept that the story is about Smythe rather than Bond, it proceeds agreeably.  The plump and comical Smythe, who paddles about the reef in front of his villa and rather pathetically talks to the fish that swim there – plus an unfriendly, tentacled mollusc whom he’s christened ‘Octopussy’ – gradually loses our sympathy as Fleming peels back the layers and we discover the cruel, and unnecessary, deed he committed to enrich himself decades earlier.  Bond is hardly a paradigm of virtue but, equipped with a conscience and a rough-and-ready code of ethics, he’s the antithesis of what’s represented by Smythe.  The scene where the flaccid and weak-willed Smythe confesses his crime to Bond is admirably low-key, but Fleming infuses it with a cold, sadistic tension.

 

The Property of a Lady, on the other hand, is a conventional Bond adventure in miniature.  It has 007 turn the auctioning at Sotheby’s of an artwork designed by Carl Faberge – according to the catalogue, “(a) sphere carved from an extraordinarily large piece of Siberian emerald matrix weighing approximately one thousand three hundred carats” – into a trap to catch the KGB’s director of operations in London.  Also involved is a female Russian double-agent working in the British Secret Service, whom the service is aware of and uses to feed fake information back to Moscow.  To be honest, the plot didn’t make sense to me.  I didn’t see how Bond, by snaring London’s top KGB man at Sotheby’s, could avoid alerting Moscow to the fact that British intelligence had cottoned onto the double agent’s existence and were using her for their own ends.

 

Still, the story is readable and the scenes set in Sotheby’s allow Fleming to show off his knowledge, acquired through research or personal experience, of the world’s most famous broker in fine art.  When Bond expresses surprise that the auctioneer doesn’t bang his gavel three times and declare, “Going, going, gone,” an expert informs him, “You may still find that operating in the Shires or in Ireland, but it hasn’t been the fashion at London sales rooms since I’ve been attending them.”

 

Elements from both Octopussy-the-short-story and The Property of a Lady turn up in Octopussy-the-1982-film, which starred Roger Moore.  In the film, the title character is not an octopus but a beautiful and mysterious woman played by Maud Adams, whose father, it transpires, once received a visit from visit by Bond similar to the visit that Major Smythe received in the original story.  The film also features a proper octopus, and there’s some business too about a Faberge egg being auctioned off at Sotheby’s.  However, if you’ve seen Octopussy-the-movie and don’t remember these things, that’s hardly surprising because it’s a mad mishmash of things – involving nuclear warheads, circuses, exiled Afghan princes, feuding Russian generals, knife-throwing identical twins, hot-air balloons, snake charmers, gorilla suits, everything bar the proverbial kitchen sink.  It’s one of the very worst Bond movies in my opinion.

 

Meanwhile, Hannes Oberhauser, the character murdered by Major Smythe in Octopussy-the-story, plays a small but important role in the backstory of Spectre (2015), the fourth Bond with Daniel Craig in the title role.  He’s mentioned in a plot twist that bears upon Bond’s relationship with his old nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz).  That twist was much derided by the critics, though as a fan of the books I was pleased that Oberhauser got name-checked in a Bond movie at last.

 

© Eon Productions

 

The third story in the book, The Living Daylights, sees Bond assigned a mission in Berlin.  He has to kill a Soviet sniper whom the KGB have lined up to shoot a defecting scientist while he flees from the east to the west of the city – the story is set shortly before the creation of the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie.  Bond has a crisis of conscience when he discovers that the enemy sniper is a woman, an attractive blonde whom he’s seen posing as a member of an orchestra that’s performing over on the Communist-Bloc side of town.  This story is incorporated, more or less intact, into the early part of the 1987 movie The Living Daylights, which was the first one to star Timothy Dalton as Bond.  In the film, however, the action is moved to Bratislava, the defector is a KGB officer and his defection is planned to take place during an orchestral performance in a concert hall.

 

Although the rest of the plot of The Living Daylights-the-film is rather convoluted and unsatisfactory, and there are a few daft moments seemingly left over from the previous movies in the series, it felt like a breath of fresh air to me at the time. It was an attempt at a slightly more sensible Bond film and had an actor in the lead role trying to depict Bond as the moody, occasionally conscience-stricken character that Fleming had originally written.  And having a big chunk of Fleming’s story in it at the start definitely helped.

 

The final story, 007 in New York, is a trifle – Bond is sent into the Big Apple to warn a former Secret Service member that the man she’s cohabiting with is actually a Soviet agent, though he spends most of the story’s eight pages planning the shopping, eating, drinking, clubbing and wenching that he’s going to do while he’s there.  This allows Fleming to show off his knowledge of the city – “Hoffritz on Madison Avenue for one of their heavy, toothed Gillette-type razors, so much better than Gillette’s own product, Tripler’s for some of those French golf socks made by Izod, Scribner’s because it was the last great bookshop in New York and because there was a salesman there with a good nose for thrillers, and then to Abercrombie’s to look over the new gadgets…  And then what about the best meal in New York – oyster stew with cream, crackers and Miller High Life at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central?  No, he didn’t want to sit up at a bar…  Yes.  That was it!  The Edwardian Room at the Plaza.  A corner table.”

 

Fleming was known to have a predilection for sadomasochism, so it’s telling that 007 in New York also sees Bond considering a visit to a bar he’d heard about that “was the rendezvous for sadists and masochists of both sexes.  The uniform was black leather jackets and leather gloves.  If you were a sadist, you wore the gloves under the left shoulder strap.  For the masochists it was the right.”  Bond has an old flame in New York whom he intends to meet up with and enjoy some nightlife with, including the S-&-M-themed nightlife, and it’s here that a tiny sliver of 007 in New York makes it into the movies too.  The old flame’s name is Solange, which is the name of the character played by Caterina Murino in Casino Royale, which saw Daniel Craig’s debut as Bond, in 2006.

 

007 in New York is tied up with a gentle, though unexpected, twist that’s worthy of Somerset Maugham – a writer whom Fleming was a big admirer of.  And that, unfortunately is it.  Fleming had passed away prior to this collection’s publication and no further Bond material was to be published under his name.  Thus, Octopussy and The Living Daylights marked the end of James Bond as a literary phenomenon…

 

For all of two years, until 1968, when Kingsley Amis published Colonel Sun.

 

© Eon Productions

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The Ken and Ollie show

 

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

 

A few days ago, Murray Melvin – the much-loved British theatrical actor, director and archivist, and a performer too on TV and in film – died at the age of 90.  While the stage was evidently Melvin’s first love, I remember him mainly for turning up in a lot of admirable, or at least memorably oddball, films: Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey (1961), Lewis Gilbert’s Alfie (1966), Desmond Davis’s Smashing Time (1967), Stephen Weeks’s Ghost Story (1974) and Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975). 

 

Melvin also appeared in four films directed by that wonderful ‘enfant terrible’ of 1960-70s British cinema, Ken Russell: The Devils, The Boy Friend (both 1971), Lisztomania (1975) and Prisoner of Honour (1991), plus in various items of Russell’s television work.  And he was in a half-dozen films directed by the equally-noteworthy Peter Medak: A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1972), Ghost in the Noonday Sun (1974), The Krays (1990), Let Him Have It (1991), David Copperfield (2000) and The Ghost of Peter Sellers (2018).  That last film was a documentary about the making of Ghost in the Noonday Sun and Medak’s own meditation on why the film was such a disaster, why it never got released by the studio, and why it nearly put an end to his filmmaking career.  (The answer to all those questions is in the documentary’s title.)  Melvin popped up to tell a few anecdotes from his time on Noonday Sun, still as bright as a button even though by then he was well into this eighties.

 

As a little tribute to Melvin, here’s a reposting of something I wrote back in 2019 about a film that features one of his best performances – Ken Russell’s gloriously provocative The Devils.

 

I wrote the following piece after watching a 111-minute version of The Devils – the ultra-controversial 1971 film starring Oliver Reed and directed by Reed’s friend, and some would say partner-in-crime, Ken Russell – on a DVD put out by the British Film Institute and introduced by Mark Kermode.  However, I understand that a longer version of the film, with an extra six minutes of restored footage, has been available since 2004.

 

If you haven’t seen The Devils in any of its versions, don’t read on.  There will be spoilers galore.

 

Based on historical events in 17th century France, and on two works inspired by those events, Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudon (1952) and John Whiting’s play The Devils (1961), the film deals with skulduggery at national and local levels.  The power-hungry Cardinal Richelieu (played by Christopher Logue, who was best known as a poet) encourages Louis XIII (Graham Armitage) to create a centralised and authoritarian France, with the Catholic Church entrenched as keeper of the national faith.  This means taking action against those French cities where power has become so entrenched that they function like autonomous city-states.

 

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

 

Particularly irksome to Richelieu is the city of Loudon, which has kept its independence thanks to its huge fortified city walls and which has a dismaying tendency to treat its Protestant citizens as equals of the Catholic ones.  Richelieu sends his agent, Baron Jean de Laubardemont (Dudley Sutton), with orders to demolish Loudon’s walls and bring the city to heel.  However, de Laubardemont is thwarted when confronted by Urbain Grandier (Reed), an eloquent and powerful city priest who’s able to bring the citizenry onto the streets to resist him and his soldiers.

 

Grandier’s political principles might be high-minded but his personal ones are anything but.  A philanderer and predator, he’s already impregnated and abandoned one woman (Georgina Hale) and is busy wooing another (Gemma Jones), whom he marries in a secret ceremony after claiming to have found theological justification that priests can become husbands.

 

Meanwhile, de Laubardemont joins forces with members of the local clergy, judiciary and trades whom Grandier has offended for personal or professional reasons and they conspire to destroy him.  Their means of doing so comes from an unexpected source – the scoliosis-stricken Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave), abbess of a Loudon convent.  Although she’s never met Grandier, Sister Jeanne has worshipped him from afar, first in a spiritual way and then – through a series of increasingly perverse and graphic visions – in an ungodly, sensual one.  Eventually she becomes deranged, her hysteria infects the nuns under her governance, and she accuses Grandier of using witchcraft to possess and corrupt her and her convent.  De Laudardemont and his allies promptly summon the witch-hunting Father Barre (Michael Gothard) to investigate.  When they’ve gathered enough ‘evidence’, they have Grandier charged with witchcraft and put him on trial for his life.

 

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

 

With its mixture of politics, sex, violence and religion, which Russell respectively depicts cynically, explicitly, unflinchingly and sacrilegiously, The Devils was and still is a provocative watch.  It had an ‘X’ certificate slapped on it in the USA, which meant few Americans got to see it.  X-certificate movies were assumed to be pornographic ones and got few theatre-bookings.  In addition, both the studio, Warner Brothers, and the censors took scissors to its more inflammatory scenes.  And Britain’s establishment critics were aghast.  The prissy and grumpy Leslie Halliwell, whose Filmgoers’ Companion books were for many years the only film-reference books British people read, dismissed it as ‘outrageously sick’ and ‘in howling bad taste from beginning to end’, while the hostility shown by the Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker culminated in a bust-up in a TV studio where Russell smacked the critic over the head with a rolled-up copy of his own newspaper.

 

These days, predictably, all that condemnatory water has passed well under the bridge.  Younger critics and filmmakers recognise Russell as a flamboyant auteur who added welcome dashes of flair, colour, imagination and daringness to a British film industry that was long accustomed to making stodgy historical costume dramas and dreary kitchen-sink dramas and seemed unaware that cinema is supposed to be, you know, cinematic.  And The Devils is acknowledged as his masterpiece.  For instance, Ben Wheatley, director of Kill List (2011) and High Rise (2016), has said, “The Devils to me stands alone in Ken Russell’s work.  It has all the fierceness and craziness of his movies, but it also has a seriousness and an intensity that isn’t in his other movies.”

 

Anyway, what’s my assessment The Devils?  Well, I’ll start with what I regard as the movie’s weakness.  Although it’s intended to be over the top, it goes a bit too over the top during the lengthy sequences where Father Barre and his lackeys invade the convent searching for proof of Grandier’s demonic influence.  Barre has already, secretly, threatened the nuns with execution unless they agree to behave hysterically.  And on cue, those nuns put on a hell of a show – a chaotic fracas of nudity, licentiousness, writhing, screaming, eye-goggling, tongue-waggling, attempted copulation with candlesticks and lewd carry-on with a giant effigy of Christ on the cross.  At this point, you feel you’re watching not so much a Ken Russell film as a parody of a Ken Russell film.  Which come to think of it, was what his later Lair of the White Worm (1988) was.

 

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

 

Otherwise, I think The Devils is magnificent.  Its highlights include the stylised sets by a young Derek Jarman, which eschew the grime, grubbiness and gloom you associate with life four centuries ago and instead are dazzlingly white and clean, but also disturbingly clinical.  These include Sister’s Jeanne’s convent, whose warren of chambers and passageways have the look of some germ-free medical institution – presumably one for the insane – and Richelieu’s headquarters, which resemble a cross between a giant bank-vault and a well-scrubbed prison and are disconcertingly staffed by priests and nuns.  The Devils’ policy of telling a historical story but not with historically accurate backdrops would appear in later British movies, most notably those made by Jarman himself when he became a director, such as Caravaggio (1986) and Edward II (1991).  And I suspect that an also-young Peter Greenaway was making notes, because The Devils has sequences reminiscent of his films, for example, one where Russell’s camera closes in on the still figure of de Laubardemont while he stands against a painting-like tableau.

 

The performances are another highlight.  The band of conspirators set on eliminating Grandier are played by a splendid rogue’s gallery of British character actors.  Dudley Sutton makes a credibly villainous de Laubardemont, his rottenness tempered with a soldierly practicality and matter-of-factness.  Northern Irish actor Max Adrian and British sitcom stalwart Brian Murphy – yes, that’s George from George and Mildred (1976-80) – are fabulously contemptible as the pair of quack medical practitioners who fall out with Grandier when he catches them trying to treat a plague victim with glass globes containing bees placed over the buboes and, even more bizarrely, a stuffed crocodile.  “What fresh lunacy is this?” Grandier bellows at them, a line that became the title of Robert Sellers’ biography of Oliver Reed, published in 2013.

 

There are excellent turns too from the impish Georgina Hale, embittered but endearing as the woman Grandier has wronged, and John Woodvine – Doctor Hirsch in the 1981 classic An American Werewolf in London – as her magistrate father, whose enmity for Grandier helps seal his fate.  Meanwhile, decked out in hippy-esque hair and John Lennon specs, Michael Gothard gives a barnstorming performance as the witch-hunting Father Barre.  Gothard’s volubility will surprise viewers who remember him chiefly as Locque, Roger Moore’s silent, expressionless foe in 1981’s For Your Eyes Only.  More nuanced is Murray Melvin, playing Father Mignon, a priest suspicious of Grandier who first alerts the conspirators to what’s happening in the convent.  Later – but too late – he realises that Grandier is innocent of the charges against him.

 

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

 

Gemma Jones is sympathetic and convincing as Madeleine, the woman whom Grandier covertly marries and the film’s only properly virtuous character.  Abandoning his philandering ways, he comes to regard her as his soulmate.  It’s difficult to imagine that Jones in The Devils is the same actress who plays the title character’s mother in the Bridget Jones trilogy (2001-16) – three smooth, smug and determined-to-play-it-safe movies that seem the polar opposite of everything Russell stood for in the British film industry.

 

Ultimately, though, The Devils belongs to its two stars.  Vanessa Redgrave’s portrayal of Sister Jeanne ranges from the unhinged and monstrous to the pitiful and pathetic, often within the same scene.  Twisted both mentally and physically, the war in her soul between sensuous yearning and stultifying piety is symbolised externally by the contrast between her comely face and the grotesque hump protruding from her back.

 

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

 

Then there’s Reed, at the height of his acting powers – powers that, alas, would wane as his thirst for alcohol increased and he became more famous as a drunken fixture on TV chat-shows than as a serious film actor.  He dominates The Devils.  He makes Grandier absolutely believable as, simultaneously, a heroic leader of men, a cerebral theologian and a sensation-hungry scoundrel.   His performance reaches a peak of intensity during the trial scenes.  Reed stuck to films and avoided the theatre, lacking the patience to go out and parrot the same lines night after night.  However, when you see him in verbal combat with Sutton before a row of judges (fearsomely clad in Ku Klux Klan-like white robes), you feel this would have been a brilliant piece of acting to watch live on a stage.

 

There follows the film’s cruel and despairing finale.  Grandier is found guilty and subjected to torture by Barre, who uses a hammer to smash his feet to a pulp.  Then he’s burned alive in the middle of a city square, in front of a nightmarishly drunken and jeering crowd – no longer does Grandier command the loyalty and affection of Loudon’s citizens.  Particularly horrible are the moments when Grandier continues to pontificate in a half-defiant, half-pleading voice while his face blackens and blisters in the flames.  This was filmed long before the advent of CGI and everything depended on the skills of the actors, the make-up people and the practical special effects team.  I imagine the scene was a difficult and gruelling one to shoot, especially for Reed.

 

The Devils certainly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.  My partner, who’s no prude, doesn’t particularly like it.  She admires the film’s performances and set design, but its dearth of sympathetic characters and surfeit of totally unsympathetic ones, and its unrelenting display of human venality, hypocrisy and superstitious stupidity, prevent her from enjoying it much.  However, if you can stomach the film’s bleak view of mankind, and you value Ken Russell’s operatic directing style, The Devils is second to none.

 

Or indeed, second to nun…  Well, I’m sure Ken and Ollie would have appreciated the pun.

 

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

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When Raquel ruled

 

© 20th Century Fox

 

From the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, Raquel Welch was probably the cinematic sex symbol as far as unreconstructed blokes in the Anglosphere were concerned – blokes who were a bit intimidated by the exoticness and general foreignness of, say, Brigitte Bardot or Ursula Andress.  Welch, who sadly died last week at the age of 82, was Chicago born but raised in San Diego.  Her time in the latter location seemed to imbue her with a healthy, clean-cut Californian glow that was an obvious physical advantage to her in her film roles.  Cerebrally, though, she didn’t win a lot of respect from her (mostly male) peers.  This sorry state-of-affairs was epitomised by some advice that Don Chaffey, director of One Million Years BC (1966), offered her early on in that movie’s filming.  Her function, he explained, was not to think, but merely to run from one rock to another.

 

I should say that when Raquel Welch was at the height of her popularity, I was too young to actually fancy her.  Instead, I just remember her as a talismanic presence in a number of movies that I found incredibly enjoyable at the time and that have stayed in my memory during the decades since.  Here are my half-dozen favourites that showcase the late, great Ms Welch.

 

Fantastic Voyage (1966)

In this science fiction epic, Welch plays Cora Peterson, technical assistant to a brain surgeon (Arthur Kennedy) and member of a medical team who are miniatured in a submarine and injected into the bloodstream of a seriously injured scientist.  Why?  Well, there’s a blood clot lodged deep in his brain that can’t be reached on an operating table, and the only option is to have miniature people inside him zapping the pesky clot to buggery with a laser beam.  Which makes sense.

 

© 20th Century Fox

 

As the scientist is a leading expert in the field of miniaturisation, which apparently is being developed on both sides of the Iron Curtain, it’s no surprise when it transpires that the Soviets have put a secret agent on board the submarine to sabotage the mission.  Neither is it a surprise when this secret agent turns out to be a character played by the reliably-twitchy Donald Pleasence.  Actually, Pleasence’s death-scene, in which he falls victim to a hungry white blood-cell, is worth the price of admission alone.

 

Yes, it’s all very silly.  In fact, when he wrote the film’s novelisation, the respected sci-fi author and professor of biochemistry Isaac Asimov tied himself in knots trying to make its plot seem more scientifically feasible.  But with imaginative sets representing the inside of the human body, and decent special effects depicting the movements of the cast and their submarine within this strange micro-verse, and capable direction by underrated filmmaker Richard Fleischer, it’s a piece of hokum that’s both entertaining and memorable.

 

One Million Years BC (1966)

To be fair to director Don Chaffey, running from rock to rock was pretty much all that Welch, as the cavewoman Loana, and John Richardson as her caveman beau Tumak, needed to do for the duration of One Million Years BC, whilst trying to escape the claws and fangs of legendary special-effects man Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion-animation dinosaurs.  The film, made by Hammer Films, is even sillier than Fantastic Voyage.  Not scripted with much attention to paleontological science, it depicts Welch, Richardson and the rest of the human cast existing alongside monster-lizards in the Calabrian Stage of the Pleistocene Epoch.  Nonetheless, Harryhausen’s splendid work transforms it into pulp-art and its poster, with Welch standing imposingly in a fur bikini, became one of the great cinematic images of the 1960s.  It’s the last poster, for instance, on the wall of Tim Robbins’ cell in The Shawshank Redemption (1994), sneakily concealing the tunnel that he’s digging out of the place.

 

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts

 

In the late 1990s, while I was living in Edinburgh, Ray Harryhausen appeared one day at the (now sadly defunct) Lumiere Cinema to give a talk about his movie-making career.  I attended, and I recall the queue that formed afterwards at Harryhausen’s table as people got him to autograph items related to his films.  Many of these were posters and video cassettes of One Million Years BC and I remember him demanding, “Did you buy these because of my dinosaurs or because Raquel Welch is on the cover in a fur bikini?”

 

Bedazzled (1967)

This being the late 1960s, it was inevitable that Welch would appear in a number of self-consciously groovy, achingly unfunny swinging-sixties comedy-movies, such as Leslie H. Martinson’s Fathom (1967) and Joseph McGrath’s The Magic Christian (1969).  However, I do like Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled, a comic retelling of the Faust story with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.  Cook is the devil, trying to ensnare the soul of the hapless Moore, and he enlists the Seven Deadly Sins to help him.  Welch, as Lust, is definitely the most fetching of the sins – not that she has much competition, considering that, for instance, Barry Humphries plays Envy.

 

By the way – a shout-out for Bedazzled’s lovely opening credits, orchestrated by Maurice Binder and accompanied by Moore’s brassy but also subtly-melancholic theme music.

 

© 20th Century Fox

 

Bandolero (1968)

God, when I was a western-daft 10-year-old, I loved Bandolero.  Directed by seemingly inexhaustible western-movie director Andrew V. McLaglen, it contained everything I could have hoped for – action, humour, bank robberies, ghost towns, a gang of outlaws, a rival gang (consisting of bloodthirsty Mexican desperadoes, the bandoleros of the title), a tenacious sheriff and his posse, and a climactic shoot-out where (nearly) everyone gets killed.  The cast is excellent too.  In addition to Welch, there’s Dean Martin and James Stewart as the brothers leading the outlaws, the ever-reliable George Kennedy as the sheriff, and a supporting cast of familiar faces like Andrew Prine, Will Greer and Denver Pyle.  You even get a glimpse of former Tarzan actor Jock Mahoney, playing Welch’s quickly-killed-off husband.

 

All right, even at the age of 10, I knew Bandolero was pushing it a bit to have us believe that Dean Martin and James Stewart could be siblings.  Still, it seemed more credible than another western I saw at the same time, The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), which posited Dean Martin and John Wayne as siblings.

 

Hannie Caulder (1971)

Another western and a rare beast indeed, a British-made western.  It’s immeasurably better than other British efforts in the genre, such as Michael Winner’s dreadful Chatto’s Land (1972) or, gulp, Carry On Cowboy (1965).  And unlike Bandolero, which had Welch as a damsel in distress, Hannie Caulder has her playing a proactive, implacable female Clint Eastwood-type, seeking revenge on the three outlaw scumbags who raped her and murdered her husband.

 

© Tigon Films / Paramount Pictures

 

Admittedly, the tone of Hannie Caulder is badly fractured.  The villains who behave so heinously towards Welch in the movie’s early stages are otherwise portrayed as a trio of comic bumblers in the tradition of the Three Stooges, and the humour feels jarring.  But if you can get past that, you’ll enjoy a cast that’s even better than the cast of Bandolero.  Essaying the villains are legendary character actors Ernest Borgnine, Strother Martin and Jack Elam, Robert Culp turns up as a bounty hunter trying to help Welch out, and Northern Irish actor Stephen Boyd, one of Welch’s Fantastic Voyage co-stars, makes a cameo as a mysterious preacher.  The fact that Hannie Caulder was made by Tigon Films, a company more famous for its horror movies like Witchfinder General (1968) and Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970), perhaps accounts for producer Tony Tenser casting Christopher Lee as the gunsmith who provides Welch with the customised weapon necessary for taking down her antagonists.  There’s even room for Diana Dors, a sex symbol from an earlier era, playing the mistress of a bordello adept at battering obnoxious customers with her frilly umbrella.

 

Almost inevitably, Hannie Caulder is much-loved by Quentin Tarantino, who cites it as an influence on his Kill Bill movies (2003-4).

 

The Three / Four Musketeers (1973-74)

This double-movie adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ 1844 novel was directed by Richard Lester, the man who helmed the two comedic Beatles movies in the 1960s.  He’d even, at one point, considered making a film where the Fab Four played the musketeers.  The Three and Four Musketeers are laced with many of Lester’s comic touches, often involving his regular collaborator Roy Kinnear, and Spike Milligan, who appears in the first film as Welch’s husband – surely the unlikeliest husband she was ever paired with onscreen.  Welch herself shows good comic talent, for example, at the end of The Three Musketeers where she gets knocked over by a jousting dummy.  At the same time, the films’ action sequences, orchestrated by the great sword-fight choreographer William Hobbs, look unnervingly realistic.  They come across as haphazard, exhausting and, yes, dangerous.  With Lester’s humour and Hobbs’ authenticity, then, the films shouldn’t work…  But somehow, they do.

 

In my mind, however, what makes these the best cinematic version of Dumas’ book is the fact that they’re packed with 1970s cinematic icons – Welch as heroine Constance Bonacieux, Michael York as hero d’Artagnan, Faye Dunaway as the villainous Milady, Christopher Lee as the equally villainous Rochefort, Charlton Heston as the equally, equally villainous Cardinal Richelieu, Oliver Reed as the brooding and frankly Oliver Reed-like Athos…  And so on.  Welch appeared in a few more films afterwards, but none were especially memorable and her time as English-language cinema’s number-one female pin-up had evidently passed.  But she could have done much worse than step out of the limelight with the Musketeers movies.

 

© 20th Century Fox

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Norm!

 

From wikipedia.org / © Gerald Lucas

 

I’m aware that some of the writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers whose work I admire were total arseholes in their personal lives.  Possessing ‘artistic genius’, or just having an ‘artistic temperament’, was for them an excuse to commit all manner of heinous sins.  Yet all I can do, I feel, is separate the art from the inadequate and disappointing personality that created it – and focus on and enjoy the former.  As the writer Poppy Z. Brite (who sometimes goes by the name of Billy Martin) wrote recently about the author V.S. Naipaul: “Past a point, you can’t help what you love.  Naipaul is my own problematic favourite, a sexist, racist, often unkind man, but I love his writing and he fascinates me as a person.”

 

To some extent, that sums up my feelings about that famous post-war American man of letters Norman Mailer, who would have been 100 years old today if he’d still been on the go.  To say Mailer was problematic as a person is an understatement.  From all the accounts the guy was a belligerent, egotistical, self-promoting, homophobic and misogynistic dickwad who lamented about ‘the womanisation of America’ and was preoccupied with the sort of toxic masculinity that, in the 21st century and as embodied by the likes of Putin and Trump, seems capable of threatening the continued existence of humanity.

 

Most notoriously, in 1960, he stuck a knife into his second wife, Adele Morales, enraged when she told him he wasn’t as good a writer as Dostoyevsky.  Morales survived and divorced him two years later.  For that reason, my partner never refers to Norman Mailer as ‘Norman Mailer’, but as ‘Stabby’.

 

Among other things on Mailer’s charge-sheet, in 1981 he was instrumental in securing parole for murderer, bank robber and forger Jack Abbott.  Abbott was also a writer, which for Mailer apparently righted all his other wrongs.  Six weeks after his parole, Abbott stabbed to death a waiter following an argument about whether or not he could use a café’s toilet.

 

And yet…  I’ve always enjoyed Mailer’s books when I’ve come across them, to greater or lesser degrees.  This is despite – or if I’m in the right mood, because of – the rampant egotism of their author often finding its way onto their pages.

 

© Rhinehart & Company

 

Mailer’s first novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) is to my mind one of the great novels written about World War II.  Mailer wrote about it from experience, as he’d been posted to the Philippines with the 112th Cavalry.  It made an impact on me with its pessimism, which isn’t just about human nature when it’s put under hideous pressure in a theatre of war.  The pessimism also concerns the current, and likely future, condition of the USA, which is symbolised by the platoon at the centre of the plot.  They represent an assortment of different ethnic and regional groups that make up American society – Jewish, Italian, Irish, Mexican, Southern – and they generally don’t like or trust each other.  In charge of them are a psychotic sergeant, an educated and liberal-minded lieutenant and, at the top of the chain of command, a fascistic general who believes the war against Japan is soon going to morph into a war against the Soviet Union.  The enlightened lieutenant offers the novel its one sliver of hope, but that hope is abruptly snuffed out in a plot-twist some way before the end.

 

However, even if you find the political allegory in The Naked and the Dead clunky, there’s no denying that it conveys the numbing physical exhaustion of warfare – especially a war fought in a jungle on a tropical Pacific island.  If George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) gets across the idea that more than anything else war will leave you bored witless, The Naked and the Dead persuades you that it’ll leave you utterly knackered too.

 

One unfortunate feature of the novel, and something that modern-day readers will no doubt find hilarious, is that Mailer had to pepper his prose with the word ‘fug’, an invented substitute for the F-word.  Warned by his publishers that the dialogue of his soldier-characters couldn’t be too realistic, even though in a real combat zone hard-pressed soldiers would be spewing the F-word endlessly,  Mailer ended up having them say things like ‘Fug you!’ and ‘Fugging hell!’  It must have stuck in Mailer’s craw – and Mailer had a big craw for things to get stuck in – when, later, he was introduced to the celebrated writer and wit Dorothy Parker and she exclaimed, “So you’re the young man who can’t spell f*ck!”

 

A decade after its publication, The Naked and the Dead was turned into a movie. It’s a prime example of Hollywood taking something with an uncompromising message and watering it down to make it more palatable to mainstream cinema audiences – and losing what made the original effective in the process.  Not only does the lieutenant (Cliff Robertson) survive at the end but, if I remember correctly, he gets to make an inspirational speech about the value of everyone pulling together.  However, Mailer was already aware of the rottenness of Hollywood and in 1955 had written a novel on the topic, The Deer Park.  This was the era when the House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities was at its most powerful and the notorious Hollywood Blacklist was ending filmmakers’ careers, events that are referred to in his book.

 

© G.P. Putnam’s Sons

 

I don’t remember much about the plot or characters of The Deer Park, but I recall the vividness of its setting, Desert D’Or, a desert town that’s become a fashionable resort and refuge for Hollywood bigwigs.  Its existence as a pocket of lavish make-believe amid the desert’s harshness is matched by the artificiality of its inhabitants, who are an immoral, scheming, backstabbing, bullying lot.  Wikipedia informs me that the novel’s title “refers to the Parc-aux-Serfs (‘Deer Park’), a resort Louis XV of France kept stocked with young women for his personal pleasure”, which seems appropriate.

 

Unsurprisingly, when the 1960s began to swing with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, and the Vietnam War, Mailer took to the decade like a duck to water.  At a young and impressionable age – 17 years old – I read Mailer’s Armies of the Night, in which he recounts how he marched on the Pentagon in October 1967 and told the US government to stop the war in Vietnam.  To be honest, Mailer did have a bit of help here.  About 100,000 people marched with him, including Allen Ginsburg, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who tried to use concentrated, psychic hippie-power to levitate the Pentagon building and ‘exorcise the evil within’.

 

© Penguin Books

 

A ’fictionalised work of non-fiction’, Armies of the Night was the first such book I’d encountered and it took me a while to get used to its central conceit, wherein Mailer describes what happened at the march not as some omnipotent narrator, or in the first person, but in the third person, so that he becomes a character in the action itself.  Yes, it’s a memorable device but, inevitably with Mailer, it’s self-aggrandising too.  At one point, possibly inspired by Armies of the Night, I wrote entries in my journal for a few months in the third person.  Years later, when I re-read what I’d written, my main thought was: “What a big-headed wanker I must have been back then.”

 

Mailer was in the first person for the next book by him I’ve read, also a work of non-fiction, 1975’s The Fight.  This is about the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, the famous boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman (who, to a younger generation, is primarily known as the inventor of the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine).  With Ali at his peak, and Foreman at his meanest and most lethal, this was, for boxing fans, an epic event.  It was also a grotesque one, because one of the 20th century’s most opulently corrupt dictators, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, hosted the fight in his country.  Sparing no expense, Mobutu also flew in some of the world’s greatest musicians, like James Brown and B.B. King, for a musical gala to accompany it.  And it was no surprise that the world’s biggest literary ego, Mailer, rocked in too to write a book about it.

 

While I prefer the 1996 documentary When We were Kings (to which Mailer contributes) as the definite account of the Rumble in the Jungle, I think The Fight is pretty good.  Mind you, with so much going on in Zaire at the time, Mailer could hardly fail to write an entertaining book about it all.  And it does provide a fascinating insight into the mind of the man who called himself the greatest…  The book mentions Muhammad Ali a few times as well.

 

Random House USA Inc

 

Having read one Mailer book from the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s, it’s fitting that the last of his works I’ve encountered is from the 1980s, 1984’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance.  Mailer didn’t take the writing of this novel terribly seriously.  It was something he dashed off in two months, to fulfil a contract, and is very obviously a pastiche / piss-take of the crime-thriller noir genre, vaguely in the tradition of Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler.  Its plot twists all over the place before, unconvincingly, the hero’s dad – a no-nonsense hard man, but with a heart of gold, no doubt representing Mailer’s own image of himself – pops up out of nowhere to sort everything out.

 

I thought it was basically rubbish, then, but it was enjoyable rubbish.  Maybe I liked it because, as with Tough Guys Don’t Dance’s hero Tim Madden, I was going through a hard-drinking phase at the time, waking up occasionally with a raging hangover but no firm idea of what I’d ended up doing the previous night.  Thus, I could relate to what Madden goes through in the book.  Though unlike Madden, I never woke up to find (1) an inexplicable tattoo on my body that hadn’t been there before, and (2) an inexplicable severed head in my possession that hadn’t been there before, either – the events that set the story in motion.

 

One thing that’s genuinely good about Tough Guys Don’t Dance is its setting, which is Provincetown in Cape Cod, Massachusetts – in real life Mailer had a house there, in Commercial Street.  He nicely captures the eeriness of the place when the summer weather has receded and the tourist season has ended, when ‘one chill morose November sky went into another’ and, seemingly, the town’s ‘true number of inhabitants must be thirty men and women, all hiding’.

 

© Penguin Random House

 

Three years later, Mailer got the chance to turn Tough Guys Don’t Dance into a movie, which he directed, and co-scripted with the distinguished screenwriter Robert Towne, and with Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios as one of the production companies.  Sounds good, yes?  Well, no.  The producers were Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus of the notorious Cannon Group, whose previous meisterwerks included Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984), Bolero (1984), Invasion USA (1985), Cobra (1986) and Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987).  And despite the talent involved, Tough Guys Don’t Dance definitely bears the Cannon imprint most strongly in terms of quality.  It’s a delirious slice of so-bad-it’s-good campness.

 

Thus, you get a party sequence, which appears to be Mailer’s idea of what a decadent 1980s shindig would be like – yuppies with feather-cut hairdos cavorting like arthritic elephants to some god-awful 1980s soft-rock music while nose-hoovering cocaine off the tabletops and brazenly opening the front door stark-naked because they think it’s their ‘boyfriend’.  (No, it’s actually the local police chief, played by Wings Hauser, come to ask them to turn the noise down.)  Still, I’m told that Mailer filmed much of the movie at his own house in Provincetown, so maybe he did hold parties like this.  Then there’s the scene where Madden (Ryan O’Neal) finds out about his wife’s infidelity and reacts with a jaw-dropping display of bad acting – “Oh man!   Oh God!  Oh man!  Oh God!” – which, over the years, has become so infamous it’s now an Internet meme.

 

To be fair to O’Neal, almost everyone in the film is having a bad-acting day.  This ranges from the way-over-the-top ‘southern’ accents sported by Debra Sandlund and John Bedford Lloyd – “Madden, take it in the mouth or you’ll die.  Will you take my pride and joy into your mouth?” – to the stilted awkwardness of just about everyone else (Hauser, Isabella Rossellini, Frances Fisher) as they try to get their tongues, and their minds, around Mailer’s dialogue, which is largely fixated on performing the sex-deed with adequate levels of manliness.  At one point Rossellini tells O’Neal that she and her husband, Hauser, “make out five times a night.  That’s why I call him Mr Five.”  Though this is contradicted when Rossellini and Hauser have an argument.  “I made you come 16 times – in a night.”  “And none of them was any good!”

 

On the plus side, Lawrence Tierney gives a solid performance as Madden’s dad.  I’ve read somewhere that after seeing him in this, a young Quentin Tarantino decided to hire him for Reservoir Dogs (1993).  Also, Mailer adds some supernatural elements that I don’t recall being in the book, and ramps up the general weirdness, so that the film becomes an oddly prescient mixture: a superficially sleepy little town, dark secrets, murder, drugs, violence, corruption, the uncanny, the strange…  There’s even a creepy forest where O’Neal has hidden his marijuana stash.  Yes, three years before the real event, did Mailer accidentally create the prototype for David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2017)?

 

© Zoetrope Studios / Golan-Globus

 

Like Captain Ahab and his whale, Mailer spent his literary life pursuing that elusive beast, the writing of the Great American Novel.  Though the critical consensus is that he never managed it, he did produce some very big books along the way, like Ancient Evenings (1983) and Harlot’s Ghost (1992), neither of which I’ve read – and with them weighing in at 709 and 1168 pages respectively, I doubt if I ever will read them.  Nonetheless, I suspect I’ll find myself perusing Mailer’s other, more digestible books in future, because basically I enjoy his stuff.  My partner may not approve, but there are still works by old ‘Stabby’ that I’d like to have a stab at.

 

And the only possible reaction to that distasteful pun is: “Oh man!  Oh God!  Oh man!  Oh God!”

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The literary Bond revisited: Moonraker

 

© Penguin Books

 

As a ten or eleven-year-old kid I read a lot of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.  Indeed, I read most of them before I ever saw any of the films.  However, it was only a few years ago, after Penguin Books brought out new editions of the novels, using the same covers that’d graced them in the 1950s and early 1960s and having contemporary writers like Val McDermid write introductions to them, that I got round to reading the novels I hadn’t come across in my boyhood – Moonraker (1955), The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) and Octopussy and the Living Daylights (1966).   I also reread a few of the novels I’d read at a young age which, for one reason or other, had gone over my head or not left much of an impression – I still vividly remembered Live and Let Die (1954) or You Only Live Twice (1964) from those far-off days, but almost nothing of Diamonds are Forever (1956) or The Man with the Golden Gun (1965).

 

And in the case of From Russia With Love (1957)…  Well, as a kid, I started reading it, but unfortunately at the time I was staying at my grandmother’s house in rural Northern Ireland.  My grandmother noticed I had my nose stuck in a book, insisted on reading the blurb on its back cover and confiscated it from me, saying she didn’t think it was suitable reading matter for someone my age.  To rub salt into the wound, she then started reading it herself.  “I’m really enjoying it,” she told me a few days later.

 

Anyway, here is the first in a series of posts in which I describe my reactions to the Fleming / Bond novels I’ve read or re-read in the 21st century.  Starting with Moonraker.

 

It’s difficult to approach Moonraker the novel without having your brain fogged by memories of Moonraker the 1979 movie, which for good or bad – well, bad, actually – was a milestone in the James Bond cinematic franchise.  The Bond movies had become increasingly absurd over the years and by 1979 both the filmmakers and cinema audiences were firmly aware of their silliness. But with Moonraker, those filmmakers – Cubby Broccoli and his team – seemed to abandon all restraint.  It was as if they decided, “The audiences know that we know the movies are silly…  And we know that they know…  So, let’s have a ball!”  The result was that Moonraker, which has James Bond (Roger Moore) blasting off in a space shuttle and taking on an orbiting space station full of villains, also blasted off into whole new realms of galaxy-sized daftness.

 

Apart from the far-fetched science-fictional plot (which might have had something to do with the success of a certain movie called Star Wars two years earlier), the stupidity includes the hulking, steel-toothed villain Jaws (Richard Keil), who’s not only invulnerable to mishaps such as falling out a plane and hitting the ground without a parachute or having a cable-car crash down on top of him, but who’s also given a cringe-inducing, comedic love interest.  But even the business with Jaws pales into insignificance compared to the sequence where Bond escapes from some baddies in Venice using a gondola that transforms into a speedboat and then into a hovercraft, whose appearance in St Mark’s Square causes a pigeon – yes, a pigeon – to do a double-take.  I remember the movie critic John Brosnan writing that at that moment he concluded “the Bond series had gone about as far down the tube it could possibly go without reaching China.”

 

© Eon Films

 

But… Trying to erase all thoughts of the movie, I started reading the book from 24 years earlier.  Unlike the film version, whose plot ricochets between the USA, Italy, South America and outer space, the novel’s action takes place entirely in England, where immensely rich industrialist, stockbroker and rocket-designer Sir Hugo Drax has built a base, with a launch site, on the south coast.  From this he intends to test-fly a new missile called the Moonraker, potentially a valuable new means of defence against the Soviet Union.  Bond first crosses paths with Drax at Blades, an exclusive and opulent London gentleman’s club, where he discovers he’s been cheating at cards.  This suggests he’s less saintly than the adoring British media has made him out to be.  Later, Bond is sent to investigate the death of a security officer at Drax’s base, where he finds further, and much more serious, evidence that Drax is a bad ’un.  In fact, Drax is an embittered former Nazi, now employed by the USSR, who plans to fit a nuclear warhead into the Moonraker and send it ploughing into downtown London during its test flight.

 

During his mission, Bond joins forces with a policewoman called Gala Brand, who’s working undercover at the base.  After Drax’s goons make a couple of unsuccessful attempts to eliminate them, they manage to thwart the scheme by sending the Moonraker off course.  Rather than striking London, it niftily lands on top of a submarine transporting Drax and his minions back to the Soviet Union.  The novel ends on a rather un-Bondian note, however.  Gala Brand reveals to 007 that she already has a fiancé and isn’t about to swoon into his arms.  So, instead, Moonraker’s final line is: “He touched her for the last time and they turned away from each other and walked off into their different lives.”

 

In Moonraker the film, Gala Brand is replaced by an American heroine called Holly Goodhead, played by Lois Chiles.  (Goodhead… Get it?  Good… head…?)  In fact, according to jamesbond.fandom.com, poor Gala is “the only lead female character of the Fleming canon not to have appeared as a character in a James Bond film”, which is puzzling given the quip-friendly nature of her name.  I could just imagine Roger Moore hoisting a crinkly eyebrow at her and intoning, “Well, this is going to be a Gala affair…” or “I know where I’d like to Brand you…”

 

© Eon Films

 

Reading Moonraker, what struck my 21st century self was the shadow that World War II casts over the plot.  It has a heavy bearing on the characters – not just on the villainous ex-Nazi Drax, who draws on German V2 technology for his missile project and intends to destroy London as revenge for his country’s defeat in 1945, but on minor ones like the lift operator in the secret-service headquarters who lost an arm during the conflict.  And of course, there are references to how Bond served in the war himself and has scars on his back to prove it.  I didn’t notice this so much when I read other Bond novels in the 1970s probably because, then, the war didn’t seem so far back in time.  I knew middle-aged people who had vivid memories of it.  And it was still being enacted on television in countless documentaries, comedies and dramas like The World At War (1973-74), Dad’s Army (1968-77), It Ain’t Half Hot Mum (1974-81), Secret Army (1977-79) and Colditz (1972-74), and the stories in practically every boys’ comic on sale in the newsagents at the time – Victor, Battle, Warlord – dealt with nothing else.  Indeed, there were probably some kids my age who believed we were still fighting the Germans.

 

And no doubt the war, or more specifically the war’s aftermath, played a part in the Bond novels’ huge success in the 1950s.  Those six years of conflict had broken Britain’s economy and Fleming’s readers inhabited a drab, grey world of rationing and austerity.  I recall a remark J.G. Ballard made in his memoir Miracles of Life (2008), about leaving Shanghai and arriving in Britain for the first time in 1946.  Taking his first steps on the soil of his home country, Ballard wondered why the British claimed to have won the war.  From the worn-out faces and rundown landscapes around him, it very much looked like they’d lost it.  Another pertinent quote is one made by Keith Richards, who said that growing up in early 1950s Britain was like living in black and white.  Only when rock ‘n’ roll arrived from America did life suddenly switch to being in colour.

 

But reading Moonraker, I also realised how far Bond is removed from the dreary reality of post-war Britain.  Fleming portrays him as a shameless consumer, one with a seemingly inexhaustible shopping budget.  He wears the most expensive labels, smokes the costliest cigars, drinks the finest wines and spirits, helps himself to the fanciest foods.  Accordingly, Bond’s first encounter with Drax in Moonraker is in the club Blades, whose service, food-and-drink and furnishings were things that most of Fleming’s 1950s readers could only dream about.  Though Fleming was accused of marketing watered-down pornography in his books, it surely wasn’t pornography of a sexual or violent nature that titillated his readers so much at the time.  It was consumer porn, intended to give a perverse, if futile, thrill to underfed and down-at-heels readers who were still carrying ration books.

 

Mind you, the fact that Moonraker’s plot is confined to 1950s England didn’t go down well with those readers who’d started reading the Bond books – Moonraker was the third in the series – for the pleasure of being transported in their imaginations to exotic locales, which in real life they lacked the financial means to visit themselves.  My trusty copy of Henry Chancellor’s guide to the novels, James Bond: The Man and his World (2005) tells me that “Fleming received a number of letters from disappointed readers complaining that Kent, even on the most glorious English summer’s day, did not compare with the tropical heat of the Caribbean.  ‘We want taking out of ourselves,’ declared one old couple, who read Bond novels to each other aloud, ‘not sitting on the beach in Dover.’”  Fleming took note of the complaints.  None of his later novels restricted Bond to English soil.

 

© Hammer Films

 

I have to say that nowadays Fleming’s descriptions of Drax’s base and its technology sound decidedly low-fi.  The references to ‘gyros’, ‘radio homing beacons’, ‘ventilation tunnels’ and, indeed, ‘rockets’ had me thinking of some old black-and-white British sci-fi movie.  They particularly made me think of the Hammer film Quatermass 2 (1957), which features both rockets and a big secret base where the villains – aliens – hang out.  For their depiction of the base, the filmmakers used the sprawling and suitably eerie oil refinery at Thurrock in Essex for location shooting, and I imagined Bond and Gala battling Drax and his minions against a similar backdrop.

 

On the other hand, one element of Moonraker’s plot that feels more relevant than ever is its notion that a super-rich tycoon could become so enthused about, and involved in, developing futuristic rocket technology.  I can think of one billionaire… no, two billionaires… no, three billionaires in 2023 whose fascination with space-going vehicles is like that of little boys with toy train-sets.

 

Finally, even as a ten or eleven-year-old, one thing I did pick up from Fleming’s novels was a sense of Bond’s melancholia – a melancholia that wasn’t hinted at in the movies until the tenures of Timothy Dalton and, later, Daniel Craig in the lead role.  You get this in Moonraker at the very beginning, with Bond calculating how many more missions he has to go on before he can retire from the secret service and what the odds are for surviving that number of missions.  Retirement for Bond, I was shocked to discover, comes at the age of 45.  Yikes, I thought.  If I’d been an agent in Fleming’s version of MI6, I’d be way beyond pensionable age now.

 

So, readers of post-war Britain, forget the thrills and spills, and forget the fine living and exotic locations, and forget the fancy cars and beautiful women.  Even Commander Bond has reasons to gripe about his lot.